Oil and Gas Exploration Editing and Proofreading Services

Exploration is a business built on being wrong most of the time. One well in four finds something, and the industry's whole financial apparatus exists to make that acceptable to people providing the money. It works when the odds are stated honestly in advance. It breaks — and the money goes elsewhere for a decade — when a prospect is described in language that lets an investor believe the well is likely to succeed.

We edit what exploration companies and their advisers produce — prospect and lead descriptions with their risking, chance of success documentation, competent person and resource reports for the market, farm-out documents and data room material, well proposals and drilling programme summaries, post-well reports and lessons learned, licence application and work programme commitments, investor presentations and market announcements, seismic interpretation summaries, environmental statements and permitting submissions, joint venture technical documentation, and community and stakeholder material for exploration areas. Our editors work on how the odds are described.

The prospect risking is where exploration writing is either honest or actionable against you, and the failure is that geological confidence and commercial confidence get expressed in the same register. A prospect with a twenty per cent chance of success is a good prospect; described without that number, it reads as a discovery waiting to happen. We work through these so the chance of success is stated as a number wherever a prospect is mentioned, including in the presentation and the announcement rather than only in the technical annex; so the individual risk elements are given — reservoir, charge, trap, seal — because a prospect at twenty per cent because the seal is uncertain is a different investment from one at twenty per cent for four separate reasons; so the resource range is presented with its low case and the fact that the low case may be uncommercial, given that a mean figure quoted alone is the number that ends up in the headline; so what the well will and will not resolve is stated, since a well that de-risks a play is worth drilling for reasons a dry hole does not destroy; so analogues are described with their differences; and so success language is reserved for events that have occurred. Documents written this way keep investors through the seventy-five per cent of wells that do not work.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including seismic interpretation, prospect data and market material. We are editors rather than geoscientists, competent persons or financial advisers, and we offer no view on prospectivity, risking or disclosure obligations. What we can do is keep the odds attached to the story.