By Dr. James Murtha
PAL No. 024, £45.00, SC, 150 pp.
A great extension of Murtha's highly successful seminars on the use of @RISK in the petroleum industry. You start here with two chapters to get up to speed on the philosophy of risk analysis and the requisite principles in probability, statistics, and Monte Carlo simulation. Following are the basic steps you�d take to actually build, run, and interpret results for a real risk analysis model in @RISK. To make it as hands-on as possible, Murtha includes lots of petroleum examples such as volumetric reserves, exponential decline, porosity and water saturation, waterflood prospect, and competitive bidding. An accompanying CD-ROM includes all these examples pre-built in Excel worksheets, as well as a trial version of @RISK 4.5! This is a rare offering in that you'll learn about the concepts of risk analysis while also getting some very solid hands-on experience with risk analysis modelling in @RISK 4.5.
Topics and examples covered include:
Overview of risk analysis and other decision analysis tools
Basic concepts of descriptive statistics and common probability distributions
Designing Monte Carlo models, including sampling from distributions and recognising dependence among input parameters
Basics of @RISK and Excel, including entering probability distributions, selecting outputs, running the simulation and exploring graphs of results
Applications of @RISK to typical petroleum industry models, including:
- Production forecast with economics
- Volumetric models for reserves
- Porosity and Saturation models
- Scheduling and Timing models
Examples in the text have been used by petroleum industry engineers, geologists and geophysicists, planners and economists, managers and technical support personnel. The text will also be useful to people outside the oil and gas industry who are interested in risk and decision analysis.
Dr. Murtha, a registered petroleum engineer, presents seminars and training courses and advises clients in risk analysis and decision making. Since 1992, over 1800 professionals have taken his classes. In 25 years of academic experience, Dr. Murtha has chaired a maths department, taught petroleum engineering, and served as academic dean of a college. Dr. Murtha has co-authored two texts in mathematics and statistics and published Decisions Involving Uncertainty - An @RISK Tutorial for the Petroleum Industry, available from Palisade Corporation.
Dr. Murtha's recent Monte Carlo models include a field production forecast, a gas balance estimator, a drilling AFE estimator, a model of a synthetic crude processing facility and a deepwater field development cashflow. Dr. Murtha has a Ph.D. in mathematics, U of Wisconsin, M.S. in petroleum & natural gas engineering, Penn State, and was the 1995-96 SPE Distinguished Lecturer in Risk and Decision Analysis and the 1998 recipient of the SPE Award in Economics and Evaluation.
Go to the Risk Analysis books page.
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