Petroleum Engineering Editing and Proofreading Services

Reserves are an opinion expressed in units of volume. The rock is real and the oil is real, but the number in the annual report is the output of assumptions about recovery, price, technology and access, made by people whose employer would prefer a larger figure. The profession has built an elaborate vocabulary to keep those opinions honest. The vocabulary only works when the writing around it does.

We edit what petroleum engineers and reserves specialists produce — reserves and resources estimates and their basis of preparation, competent person and reserves reports, development plans and field development documentation, well proposals and drilling programmes, production forecasting and decline analysis documentation, reservoir modelling and history matching reports, economic assumptions and cut-off documentation, well intervention and workover programmes, abandonment and decommissioning cost estimates, partner and joint venture technical submissions, regulatory and licensing submissions, and technical disclosure supporting corporate reporting. Our editors work on the number that leaves the technical department.

The reserves estimate is where petroleum engineering meets people who will never read the reservoir model, and the discipline is keeping the category attached to the number. Proved, probable and possible are not degrees of enthusiasm; they are defined confidence levels, and a document that adds them together without saying so has produced a figure that means nothing. We write these so every quoted volume carries its category and, where a range is given, the probabilistic basis behind it; so aggregation is described — whether volumes were summed arithmetically or aggregated probabilistically, since summing proved reserves across fields and summing the 3P case are different operations with different meanings; so the economic assumptions are stated on the same page as the volume, because reserves are the portion economically recoverable and a price deck change moves the number without anything happening underground; so the technical and commercial conditions on which recovery depends are named, whether a facility upgrade, a partner sanction or a licence extension, given that reserves contingent on an unsanctioned project are a different asset; so the effective date and the changes since the last estimate are given with the reason for each — revision, extension, production, acquisition — as unexplained movement is what draws scrutiny; and so the qualifications of whoever prepared it are stated. Estimates written this way survive both an audit and a downturn.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including reservoir data, estimates and commercial information. We are editors rather than petroleum engineers or reserves evaluators, and we offer no view on volumes, categories or economic assumptions. What we can do is keep the category and its conditions travelling with the number.