Guest Editorial: Spacing Ourselves to Death

If you talk to a typical subsurface professional working on unconventionals today (e.g., a reservoir engineer, completion engineer, geologist, petrophysicist, etc.) as I have in person and through media such as LinkedIn, you will find that many lament one key thing: Our sophisticated models have been reduced too much. Of course, I am generalizing and those are not the words they use; the lamentations come in many forms. The dissatisfaction with oversimplification is most easily observed as dis-taste for the type curve, the simplified model we use to predict upcoming new drills. (Yes, I know many of you will want to refer to them by their “proper” name: type well curve; I will be sticking with the colloquial version.) A simple meme posted on LinkedIn about type curves garnered one of the most engaged conversations I have seen amongst technical staff. The responses varied from something like “Thank God someone finally said this out loud” to comments such as “I don’t know anything better than type curves.” Most comments were closer to the former than the latter. What is even more remarkable is that our investors feel the same. In personal conversations, many of them refer to our type curves simply as “lies.” This perception, coupled with the historical lack of corporate returns, led investors away from our industry in droves. Many within the industry see it differently and want to blame the exodus on other factors such as oil and gas prices, climate change, competition from renewables, other environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, the pandemic, or OPEC’s unwillingness to “hold the bag” any longer. If you ask them, though, investors will tell you a simple answer: The unconventional business destroyed way too much capital and lied too much through the type curves. Why is it that both investors and technical staff are unhappy with our ability to accurately model future performance? Why can’t we deliver returns? The typical unconventional-focused oil and gas company has two models that are critical to the business. First is the subsurface model, with which we are all intimately familiar in its various forms, and the second is the corporate financial model, which is focused on cash flows, income, and assets/liabilities. It is unfortunate that the two models are separate. It means we must simplify one or both so they can communicate with each other. How can you observe this oversimplification while it is happening? It is happening when the finance staff say, “Please just give me a simple type curve and well count; I need to model, optimize, and account for debt/leverage, equity, and cash flows.” Meanwhile, the technical staff say, “Please just give me a CAPEX budget or a well count; I need to model, optimize, and account for well spacing, completion design, land constraints, and operational constraints.” Looking back, we know that the winner in this tug-of-war of competing needs was the type curve.