caa a22 4500 60553876X CHVBK 20210128100903.0 cr unu---uuuuu 210128e20150301xx s 000 0 eng 10.1007/s11053-014-9240-1 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)springer-10.1007/s11053-014-9240-1 Evaluation of Development Options for Alaska North Slope Viscous and Heavy Oil [Elektronische Daten] [Emil Attanasi, Philip Freeman] Current estimates of discovered viscous and heavy oil in Alaska's North Slope are 12 billion barrels of oil-in-place and 12-18 billion barrels of oil-in-place, respectively (see Appendix1 for conversion to SI units). Since the early 1990s to the end of 2010, cumulative viscous oil production has amounted to 150 million barrels, and there has been no commercial production of heavy oil. During the last three decades, the industry has been challenged to develop technologies to commercially produce these untapped oil resources in this Arctic environment. In this paper, the general locations and geologic properties of the viscous oil-bearing West Sak/Schrader Bluff and heavy oil-bearing Ugnu stratigraphic intervals are described first. The geologic variability within these deposits and the evolution of technology have forced an incremental development approach, requiring costly field testing at the pilot scale of innovative extraction techniques. Although viscous oil is currently produced, its development is not mature, and firms appear to be still spending large sums on new approaches to improve recovery. The analysis specifies a representative viscous oil project and then applies a "real options” framework using simulation to determine whether the risked expected project value is sufficient to fund required expenditures on extraction process research and field testing. Computations show available field test funds to be highly sensitive to the operator's hurdle rate of return as well as the range in magnitude of potential State revenues. The contribution of the paper is solving this problem using an approach where the extreme low return and high scenarios need only be specified, and where the uncertainties are modeled with beta distributions based on historical data or expert opinion. 2014 International Association for Mathematical Geosciences (Outside the USA), 2014 Viscous oil nationallicence Heavy oil nationallicence Alaska North Slope nationallicence Project valuation nationallicence Attanasi Emil US Geological Survey, National Center, Mail Stop 956, 20192, Reston, VA, USA aut Freeman Philip US Geological Survey, National Center, Mail Stop 956, 20192, Reston, VA, USA aut Natural Resources Research Springer US; http://www.springer-ny.com 24/1(2015-03-01), 85-106 1520-7439 24:1<85 2015 24 11053 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11053-014-9240-1 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 Metadata rights reserved Springer special CC-BY-NC licence nationallicence 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-springer NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11053-014-9240-1 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Attanasi Emil US Geological Survey, National Center, Mail Stop 956, 20192, Reston, VA, USA aut NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Freeman Philip US Geological Survey, National Center, Mail Stop 956, 20192, Reston, VA, USA aut NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Natural Resources Research Springer US; http://www.springer-ny.com 24/1(2015-03-01), 85-106 1520-7439 24:1<85 2015 24 11053