A Ryder Scott independent reserves report has always been a widely accepted assurance of asset value by the worldwide oil and gas industry. Our appraisals of oil and gas shale properties are no exception.
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E&P companies and financial institutions rely on our internationally recognized “green book” consulting report to help mitigate risks in committing capital for acquisitions, exploration, field development and redevelopment, infrastructure and refinancing.
National oil companies and governments turn to Ryder Scott to provide indispensable support and advice on evaluating and managing new shale plays. Unconventional oil and gas accumulations are becoming valuable natural resources for several countries.
Our public company clients in the shale depend on Ryder Scott to make sure that reserves disclosures filed with regulatory agencies worldwide comply with reporting requirements.
Decades of Shale Experience
Ryder Scott has grown its expertise by working with clients in their early efforts in the Appalachian and Antrim shales and later in the Barnett shale play where horizontal-drilling and fracing techniques were introduced more than 20 years ago. Today our geologists and petroleum engineers evaluate oil and gas shale plays the world over in various development stages — from undrilled to relatively mature with high-density well spacing.
More than 100 clients in the shale have relied on Ryder Scott for a range of services, including full-scale reserves evaluations, audits/process reviews, management advisory services and field development recommendations. We have prepared third-party forecasts of oil and gas production and cash flows from most major developed shale plays worldwide. Ryder Scott also has issued numerous reports on prospective and contingent resources in early-stage shale plays.
Scientific Analysis Increases Booked Reserves
At Ryder Scott, we believe that understanding and using the science behind shale development increases bookable reserves and confidence in them. Ryder Scott uses every scientific method available for oil and gas shale evaluation including the following:
- Core Analysis for porosity, water saturation and total organic carbon
- Laboratory desorption and adsorption analysis
- Petrophysical analysis with core data correlations
- Petrophysical analysis with the Passey method
- Geophysical analysis of seismic data
- Microseismic analysis for fractured rock-volume estimates
- Volumetric analysis including free and absorbed components
- Flowing material balance analysis
- Square-root-of-time plots
- PVT analysis PVT analysis
- Rate-transient analysis including modeling transient- vs. boundary-dominated flow
- Numerical simulation
- Frac breakthrough modeling
Leveraging Knowledge Base
Shortly after project startup, clients immediately benefit from our in-house knowledge base. Ryder Scott has built large regional databases with public and proprietary information to create maps of oil and gas trends with tens of thousands of data points for each shale play.
Database “building blocks” include well locations in sweet and trouble spots, initial and daily production rates, estimated recovery factors and ultimate recoveries correlated with mapping by area and depth. We generate and inventory type curves for comparative analysis to identify best-fi t performance analogs. Our analysis of statistical performance data yields predictable, repeatable reserves estimates in analogous areas.
We evaluate and catalogue well-test results, fluid properties, drilling-and-completion techniques such as well trajectories, TVDs, lateral lengths, frac stages and proppant amounts. Key geological information, such as thermal-maturity and TOC data, is also stored information, such as thermal-maturity and TOC data, is also stored and indexed.