ABSTRACT

Outcomes of exploratory well drilling in a petroleum play form a spatial point pattern evolving in both space and time. The characteristics of such patterns provide important clues about magnitudes and locations of undiscovered petroleum deposits. Projects of wildcat successes and failures in a play or basin are reasonably based on the assumption that drilling history influences future drilling outcomes. But how? Very little empirical statistical work that might suggest an answer is available in the published literature. One possible reason is that drilling data, even data as simple as wildcat successes and failures, have a spatial dimension. The spatial character of such data renders it more difficult to analyze systematically than non-spatial data.

The objective here is to suggest one possible approach to modelling the evolution of exploratory drilling in a play that allows us to test the hypothesis that wildcat drilling outcomes are spatially interdependent, and to show how this interdependence, if present, can be displayed.

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