Elicitation of Expert Judgment to Assess Undiscovered Oil and Gas Resources

_______________________________________________________________________ In frontier areas, where well data is sparse, many organizations, including the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) have used expert judgment to estimate undiscovered resources. In this process, several important issues arise. How should the knowledge be elicited? At what level of aggregation (geologic process model, play, petroleum system, country, etc.) should the assessment be preformed? How and at what stage of the estimation process should feedback be given to assessors? Is independent replication of estimates possible? How are issues of dependency dealt with? Which attributes should be specified as point estimates and which should be specified by distributions? The methodology used in the USGS’s 1002-Artic National Wildlife Refuge assessment in which fractiles were estimated will be discussed together with proposed modifications for the USGS’s National Petroleum Reserve – Alaska assessment.