Offshore oilfield development planning under uncertainty and fiscal considerations

The development planning of an offshore oil and gas field infrastructure involves critical investment and operating decisions at an early stage of the project that impact the overall project profitability. These strategic/tactical decisions need to be made considering sufficient reservoir details, fiscal contracts with the government and uncertainty in the field parameters to be useful in practice. However, it makes the optimization problem difficult to model and solve. With this motivation, the objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of a unified modeling framework and solution strategies to address the issues of complex fiscal rules and endogenous uncertainties in the development planning of offshore oil and gas field infrastructure that relies on our recent work in this area. In particular, the paper emphasizes the need to have as a basis an efficient deterministic model that can account for various alternatives in the decision making process for a multi-field site incorporating sufficient level of details, while being computationally tractable for large instances. Consequently, such a model can be effectively extended to include other complexities, for instance a production sharing agreement and endogenous uncertainties. Computational results on the deterministic as well as multistage stochastic instances of the problem are discussed.