Business Intelligence for Oil & Gas: Production, AFE Tracking, and Reserves Reconciliation

An upstream operator's BI team builds production dashboards. The reserves team reviews and identifies the issue: the dashboard's cumulative production by well doesn't match the production history feeding the reserves estimate. The reasons are familiar at every operator that builds BI without oil and gas discipline. The dashboard uses daily production from SCADA; reserves uses allocated production from the production accounting system after back-allocation. The dashboard counts gas at the meter; reserves counts gas at the sales point after shrinkage. The dashboard shows a well's production using one set of downtime rules; reserves applies different downtime definitions aligned to SEC guidance. Each difference is defensible in isolation. Together they make the dashboard useless for reserves analysis — which is the highest-stakes use case BI could support at an upstream operator.

Oil and gas BI done right encodes the production accounting and reserves definitions correctly from day one. Production reporting aligned to the production accounting allocation rules — the same numbers the reserves team uses. AFE spend tracking against authorized amounts with the field-level vs JV-partner-allocable distinction partners expect. JIB reconciliation dashboards with the specific allocation methodology each JV uses. LOE (Lease Operating Expense) analytics with the cost categorization field operations and finance both recognize. Hedging position dashboards tied to physical barrels. All sourced from production accounting (P2, Quorum, Enertia) and the GL with reconciliation after every close. Done this way, BI becomes operational and strategic. Done generically, every reserves question requires parallel calculation.