A proper field development plan is an essential component for exploiting new resources on the NCS in a profitable, effi-cient, safe and environmentally friendly manner. The goal is to define a detailed execution plan, timeframe, require-ments and costs, contract framework, among others, to maximize the economic value to the stakeholders while producing the resources in a safe and environmentally responsible manner. However, this is extremely challenging because the data available is limited and uncertain, the time available for evaluation is often short and there are several socio-economic, political and regulatory constraints to honor. Moreover, the future operation, performance and success of the field depends on devising an optimal field development concept capable of counterbalancing varying conditions and unexpected events during execution and operation.

Challenges and opportunities

There are several important challenges during the devel-opment of oil and gas fields that must be taken into account such as volatile and low hydrocarbon prices, cost overrun, reservoirs of marginal size, adoption and assimilation of new technologies, quantifying and decision making under uncertainty, improving the field’s environmental perfor-mance, projects in remote, sensitive and harsh locations, among many other factors.

Nowadays, there are several rapid-moving advances and progress in the fields of machine learning, artificial intelli-gence, data analytics, digital twins that have considerable potential to improve existing work processes if under-stood and assimilated properly. Also, there are other more mature technologies such as automatic control and opti-mization, mobile robotics, remote operations, stochastic analysis, which have a proven track-record of success in other industries, but which are not yet fully adopted by the oil and gas sector.

Research strategy

The goal of the field development and economics research area is to tackle the challenges mentioned above, and ultimately develop (digital) solutions that can improve field development workflows and be successfully assimilated by the industry. Simply put, the primary focus is on devel-oping, testing and quantifying methods to gather, analyze, process, filter and study information, as well as on efficient decision making based on available information.

The ambition is to fully exploit the advantage of digital and automation solutions, traditional and recent, to improve and ultimately make a step change in the planning and development of oil and gas fields. We start with mature and well-known knowledge and methods, understand their advantages and limitations and devise strategies for further development. Newer trends and methods will also be studied and explored to determine their potential value and applicability for field development, followed by even-tual further development. In this way we aim to combine the best of mature and novel methods to maximize useful-ness, reduce user complexity and enhance robustness, scalability and sustainability.

Relevant methods to consider, evaluate and expand further in our research are: integration of heterogeneous models, development of large-scale digital twins, optimization and control at different time scales, stochastic analysis, risk and safety analyses, decision making theory, robotics, data analytics, real options, machine learning and artificial intelligence , blockchain and digital organizational theory. Expected outcomes of the research are better field plan-ning methods and development strategies fully or partly based on digitally enabled work processes and digital technologies. This includes methods to:

• Integrate efficiently and timely uncertain and heteroge-neous information for digitally       enabled work processes and digital technologies within field development.

• Determine when is it worthwhile to acquire more infor-mation in different stages of field development.

• Automatically detect and flag critical project drivers and the most important factors.

• Take optimal field planning decisions.

• Consider, evaluate and follow-up the use of novel and unproven technologies in a hydrocarbon field.