01. Integrated Upstream Planning Essentials - Lesson 1.01: Introduction
There is this interesting space in upstream oil and gas called planning. Depending on who you say the word planning to, they'll think of something different. Executives will think of financial planning or strategy work. Reservoir engineers will think of field development planning, maybe or reserves. Landmen will think about where to get beers after golf. Drilling and completions will think about scheduling, maybe logistics, things like that. But there's a relatively small contingent of people that work across this full spectrum of what we might call planning. I'm one of them. And this space is really fascinating to me because in most oil and gas operators I see, there's a lot of focus on the individual pieces of planning, but not quite enough focus on the integration of those different pieces. And that integration is really in pretty poor shape. So this is important because planning is the support system for how decisions are made. So it's no wonder that there's unhealthy conflict between assets and corporate, between operations and economists, between engineers and executives. There's just not enough clarity for everybody on the full picture. And that's the problem that this course aims to help solve.