A Guest Post by George Kaplan
Reserves
The OGA issues UK oil and gas reserve values each year, but only in total, not for individual fields as is done in Norway, Mexico, GoM and Brazil (which reports by basin rather than field). The reserves are not backdated to discovery date so it’s not possible to generate anything like a true creaming curve, but they are split into categories of proved, probable and possible, and, since 2015, contingencies. Operators in the UK North Sea have up to five years to announce estimated resources in discoveries so there may be uncertainties for recent years, unlike in the Norwegian section where estimate must be declared as soon as they are known.
