SPE-Egypt 21 June: Bridging over Uncertainty: Past Performance into Forecasting

The monthly meeting of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) - Egypt chapter, will take place on the 21st of June at 18:30 in Sofitel El-Maadi Hotel. The Meeting Sponsor is IPR Group of Companies. The election for the next year Board and Student's Paper Contest Winners Announcement will take place during that meeting. Dr. Sameh Macary will be presenting a topic titled "Bridging over Uncertainty: Past Performance into Forecasting"

Engineers tend to be more deterministic. With the ever growing challenges of decision making and risk assessment associated with huge investments, the “need” to realize many (or even all) objectives of the business endeavor becomes crucial. Expecting probable outcomes of a future process yet to leave them comfortable in using just determinism.

However, scientific/technical education drives us to spend more time and money to get closer to “The Answer”. This leads naturally to deterministic conservative estimates, possibly false precision and frequent surprises.

This presentation aims to design the concept of modeling the existing data into visualized tools to help in predicting the future. Engineers should use the Monte Carlo Simulation, Decision Trees, Data Bases, Expert Systems, Linear Programming, Design of Experiments and all types of Artificial intelligence to state their uncertainties not as discrete values, but as continuous ranges. G&G, reserves estimates, development planes, operations, EOR or IOR, and economics are vast areas to apply these techniques.

How high are the “highs” and how low are the “lows” and when they occur are difficult to predict. So let us put our past experience on an updated form to be an ongoing process to help currently in minimizing uncertainties and to include future knowledge.

One of the already proved approaches to tackle uncertainty is the multidisciplinary team. However, members of this team have to unify first their views, thoughts, and sometimes even units!!! They’re also requested to use each available visualization tool; experimenting sensitivity analysis to define the way for process optimization.

Speaker Biosketch

Dr. Sameh Macary
Recently joined IPR Group of Companies. He worked for GUPCO 8 years and Schlumerger 3 years as part-time consultant. Dr. Macary is the Production Department Head and Petroleum Engineering Professor in Egyptian Petroleum Institute. Sameh was graduated 1981 Cairo University with Honor and then was appointed as instructor for two years in the Engineering Mathematics & Physics Department. Dr. Macary Has M. Sc. 1985 and Ph. D. 1988 in Pet. Eng. From Azerbaijanian Institute of Oil & Chemistry. Dr. Macary is the Tech. Prog. Chairman of the local Section and the representative of Egypt in the ME SPE Council.