SIMULATION OF FUTURE NATURAL-GAS PRODUCTION AND EXPLORATION

A simulation model is developed in this paper to estimate the number and timing of the exploratory attempts required to fulfill a company's long term gas commitment. The model simulates that company's production, exploration, and discovery in the given sedimentary basin. It also considers exploration by other companies in the same area, and uses a field distribution to determine the size of the discovery. A number of simulation experiments were performed to illustrate the use of this model and to study the importance of several system parameters. Analysis of the experiment results showed that the amount of gas committed and the production profile and acceleration of production have the most effect upon the level of exploratory and discovery effort required to fulfill the long term gas commitment. The experiments also showed that the factor over which an operator was the least control, the exploration rate in the basin, is relatively insignificant at the levels tested.