Upstream Oil and Gas Development Lifecycle Costing

• Better collaborate within multidisciplinary teams on field development planning tasks leading to investment decisions
• Give a comprehensive overview of the nature and magnitude of exploration, development, production and decommissioning costs
• Explain how to express lifecycle costings in cash flow and economic models
• Describe the challenges of upstream lifecycle costing, and dealing with uncertain and incomplete information

Upstream Oil & Gas Lifecycle Costing

• Aspects of the upstream oil and gas exploration, development and production industry.
• The asset (oil or gas field) lifecycle from acquisition and exploration, through to production and decommissioning
• Relationship to cost estimation and cost engineering
• Approaches to costing
• Bottom-up vs. top-down approaches
• Analog, benchmarking, parametric and cost metrics approaches
• Provision for engineering growth, contingency, unallocated provision, operator's reserve
• Types of cost: exploration; capital (capex), operating (opex) and decommissioning (abex)    

Upstream Oil and Gas Lifecycle Cost Components

• Description of the items (activities, services, wells, facilities) that add to lifecycle costs (so they mean more than just numbers in a spreadsheet)
• Illustrative costs for all components
• The parameters ('key-drivers') that most influence the cost of components
• Cost metrics and rules-of-thumb
• Building of a cost model    

Field Development Planning

• Introduction of the time element
• Time value of money, discounted cash flow, basic petroleum economics
• Cost, production, revenue, cash-flow profiles
• Building of an economic model    

The Wider Context

• Issues relevant to how costs are prepared, used and influenced
• Petroleum production licences and contracts
• Cost 'train wrecks' – when costs go out of control
• The wisdom (and cost) of front end loading (FEL)
• Current and future challenges to oil and gas production (and hence to costing)
• Human aspects (biases, irrationality, vested interest) that can skew costing
• Dealing with risk, uncertainty and incomplete information
• Decision making
• Regional and host-country factors, including productivity and local content issues

• Upstream oil and gas industry professionals, managers and discipline experts, who need to gain a deeper understanding of upstream lifecycle costing
• Persons involved in industry oversight, from regulators, government agencies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), charities, special interest and campaigning groups that need to better understand the cost constraints under which oil companies operate
• Early career professionals wishing to advance their understanding of upstream oil and gas costing and economics issues