Oil and Gas Exploration Editing and Proofreading Services

One well in four finds anything at all, and the entire financial apparatus of exploration exists to make that ratio acceptable to the people providing the money. It works when the odds are stated in advance and in plain figures. It breaks when a prospect is described in language that lets an investor believe the well is likely to succeed and the well then comes in dry. The money does not simply leave that company; it leaves the sector, sometimes for a decade.

The documents we edit for Oil and Gas Exploration

Prospect and lead descriptions with their risking, chance of success documentation, and competent person and resource reports for the market carry the numbers an investor decides on, and those documents are the center of what we edit for exploration companies. Farm-out documents and data room material, well proposals and drilling program summaries, post-well reports and lessons learned, and license application and work program commitments pass through the same reading. 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 are handled here too. Our editors work on how the odds are described.

What the editing involves

Geological confidence and commercial confidence are different quantities, and exploration documents habitually express them in the same register. A prospect with a 20 percent chance of success is a good prospect, and saying so plainly costs nothing. The same prospect described as high-graded, with an attractive four-way closure, a strong analog to a producing field nearby, and no figure attached to any of it, reads instead as a discovery waiting to be confirmed. Our first requirement is that the chance of success appears as a number wherever the prospect is named, in the investor presentation, the market announcement, and the technical annex alike. A figure that lives only in the annex is a figure the audience that matters never reads.

The individual risk elements matter as much as the aggregate number. A prospect at 20 percent because the seal is uncertain is a different investment from a prospect at 20 percent arrived at through separate weaknesses in reservoir, charge, trap, and seal. The resource range needs its low case shown beside the mean, together with a statement of whether the low case would be commercial at all, because the mean quoted alone is the figure that reaches the headline. What the well will and will not resolve belongs in the same document, since a well that de-risks a play retains value a dry hole does not destroy. Analogs are useful only where their differences from this prospect are described, and success language is reserved for events that have already occurred. Documents written this way keep investors through the 75 percent of wells that do not work.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including seismic interpretation, prospect data, and market material. We are editors, not geoscientists, competent persons, or financial advisors, and we offer no opinion on prospectivity, risking, or disclosure obligations. What we can do is keep the odds attached to the story.