On-screen Digitisation
The on-screen digitisation is an extremely useful and popular facility. Use a scanner, digital camera or even mobile phone to get a contour map on screen, and then trace around the contours with the mouse. The resulting area/depth table can be imported directly into the volumetrics section.
Consolidations
Although simple in principle, the Consolidations module is extremely powerful, and opens up a whole new area of evaluation which less comprehensive programs completely ignore.
In its most basic form, a consolidation is just the probabilistic addition of input distributions – which are normally prospect evaluations. Individual prospects or fields may be summed to derive lease or on-block reserves.
The results of consolidations may themselves be consolidated. In this way, reserves figures may be obtained by play, basin, block, country or any other required sub-division. At the top of the pyramid, a corporate profile can be produced.
Perhaps the most important, powerful and frequently overlooked use of consolidations is in evaluating the influence of dependent risks in prospect appraisal. For example, consider a prospect with two segments which share a common source (so that proving hydrocarbons in one segment effectively proves the source in the other segment) but do not share a common seal.
Consolidating the two segments with the risks properly linked can give a significantly different result to treating them either as completely independent or as one prospect (i.e. assuming that proving up one segment proves up the other); and this may be the difference between the decision to drill or not.
Consolidations are also used to evaluate the results of a single well with more than one horizon, and drilling programs.