CapEx and OpEx Estimation and Optimization

Capital expenditures (CapEx) refers to the money your company spends towards fixed assets, such as the purchase, maintenance, and improvement of buildings, vehicles, equipment, or land. You might also hear this called PP&E, short for property, plant, and equipment. One-time purchases of these major physical goods or services are intended to benefit the organization for more than one year. Operating expenses (OpEx) are the funds that support your day-to-day business. OpEx items are generally used up within the year they are purchased.

The use of suitable CapEx and OpEx management practices from the early stages of the asset lifecycle for maintenance, labor, energy, chemicals, and transportation can help to mitigate the impact that facility design decisions have on mature stages of the asset lifecycle. These practices can also contain the effect that facility design decisions have on the annual evaluation of the field economic limit and recoverable reserves. Because each oil and gas asset in the world is unique, analogous asset data could serve as a starting point to develop robust estimations. However, it takes more than just data to develop a statistically significant CapEx and OpEx estimation. Your Company can have a broad portfolio of existing asset historical data or third-party public data sources to feed into your models, but the quality of this data may not be guaranteed. Thus, developing robust technical and economic assumptions for a new operation based on specific characteristics and complexities can only be accomplished by blending a strong dataset with industry experience.

PetroPlat’s database has information on several offshore and onshore fields in many regions and countries. PetroPlat updates its database from time to time by gathering data from operators’ information systems and reviewing it with them over a period of several weeks. We offer a unique approach to estimate the complexity level of your new operation, allowing you to properly estimate new OpEx scenarios when variations on your design characteristics are made. PetroPlat combines the expertise of industry subject matter experts with statistical models to identify the key cost drivers and weight of cost drivers on each operation type, such as production and capacity levels, kit size, wells, and other market factors. This approach, combined with PetroPlat’s country prices database, allows you to generate accurate CapEx and OpEx estimates at each stage of your asset’s lifecycle.