From Basin to Balance Sheet

About From Basin to Balance Sheet

Things I'm thinking about

Publisher

Jeff Parke

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

27 May 2026

Latest episode

12 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

18 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   12 Oct 2026

   Decommissioning - The Final Obligation

   How much longer can a field keep going? When will the cost of operating it exceed the value of the oil it produces? And what will it cost to dismantle a structure that took years and billions of pounds to build? Because even on the day that last barrel is produced, the work is far from over. Deep beneath the seabed, wells must be permanently sealed. Miles of pipelines must be cleaned and made safe. Thousands of tonnes of steel and concrete must be dealt with. And an entire offshore installation, which has stood against a harsh operating environment for decades, must eventually be retired. It's the remarkable final act in the life of an oil field. After years spent finding hydrocarbons, building facilities and maximising production, the industry's attention turns to bringing everything safely to a close.

2. 

   4 Oct 2026

   Special *Managing Careers Against Uncertainty*

   One of the realities of working in oil and gas is that the industry is cyclical, and those cycles can be severe. I’m going to talk about why this industry repeatedly creates moments like these and what happens to us when the future we expected suddenly changes. This episode is a little more personal than the others, exploring how I think we can begin to respond in a way that gives us some influence over what comes next.

3. 

   4 Oct 2026

   New Owner, New Value - Mergers, Acquisitions & Divestments

   Transactions are a fundamental part of the upstream life cycle. Companies merge. They buy competitors or individual assets. They combine parts of their portfolios into joint ventures. They sell fields that no longer fit their strategy, sometimes to companies whose entire business model is built around precisely that type of asset. And that raises an interesting question. If two competent companies can look at the same field and reach opposite conclusions—one deciding to sell and the other deciding to buy—how can they both be right?

4. 

   4 Oct 2026

   Mature Assets - Managing the Decline

   Decline is not just the passive final slope on a production graph. It is a sequence of choices. The team can drill between existing wells, repair damaged completions, improve sweep, remove processing constraints or connect nearby discoveries. Each action may add reserves, accelerate production or reduce cost. It may also consume capital that could earn a better return elsewhere. The commercial task is to distinguish a genuine opportunity from an attempt to preserve yesterday’s production at any price. A mature field must still compete for money, people and equipment. Its history may explain why the facilities exist, but only future cash flow can justify the next investment.

5. 

   3 Oct 2026

   Reservoir Management - Delivering the Plan

   A project is sanctioned using the best description available at the time combined with a statistical understanding of what our experiences elsewhere have taught us: seismic, a handful of wells, fluid samples and engineering assumptions, along with risk events to look out for with appropriate surveillance. Production then becomes a full-field experiment. Every pressure, rate and equipment failure adds evidence. The commercial challenge is to turn it into better decisions quickly enough to protect production, control cost and improve economic recovery. That is field management: not simply keeping the plant running, but continually reconciling reservoir potential, well performance, facility capacity, operating cost, contractual commitments and organisational capability. It is how the value promised at sanction is either delivered, improved—or quietly lost.

6. 

   20 Sept 2026

   Finance - Barrels to Dollars

   Petroleum economics brings the consequences of substantial expenditure and significant uncertainty together in a common language. So when we say that a project is worth five hundred million dollars, or has an IRR of twenty-five per cent, there is a whole physical and commercial story sitting underneath that number. And understanding it matters because almost every major upstream decision eventually becomes a comparison between different streams of future cash.

7. 

   1 Sept 2026

   Projects - Building the Asset

   Should the field have a large standalone facility, or a smaller development tied back to existing infrastructure? Should it be built around twenty wells or twelve? Does it need large water-injection capacity from first oil? These are detailed engineering questions. But more importantly, they are development-choice questions. Get them broadly right, and good project execution can turn the concept into a successful asset. Get them badly wrong, and excellent execution may simply build the wrong thing very efficiently. I’m Jeff Parke, and this is From Basin to Balance Sheet—the integrated story of how a geological possibility becomes an investment, a producing asset and, eventually, a retirement obligation.

8. 

   30 Aug 2026

   Operations - Making it Work

   This is the life for which the field must really be designed. Development planning and construction may occupy five or six years, but the facilities can operate for twenty-five years or more. Over that period, the undiscounted cost of operating and maintaining them may exceed the original capital investment. A design that looks efficient on the project schedule can therefore become an expensive burden if it is difficult to operate, hard to inspect or dependent on equipment that cannot be maintained without shutting down production. This isn’t about facility start-up and operations on day one of commissioning. It is about the how frontline staff operate the asset safely, reliably and economically as the reservoir declines, the fluid mix changes and the equipment grows older. I’m Jeff Parke, and this is From Basin to Balance Sheet — the integrated story of how a geological possibility becomes an investment, a producing asset and, eventually, a retirement obligation.

9. 

   18 Aug 2026

   Facilities - The Path to Sales

   The facility is where the development becomes physically visible. Steel vessels, pipework, compressors, pumps, tanks and control systems occupy a desert site, rise above the sea on a platform, or sit inside the crowded topsides of a floating production vessel. Their purpose is straightforward to describe but difficult to achieve: accept whatever the reservoir and wells deliver, separate the useful fluids, remove what the customer or regulator will not accept, and keep doing it safely as rates, pressures and compositions change. Facilities are therefore not simply the equipment placed downstream of a finished subsurface design. Their capacity, flexibility, weight, cost and location can change which wells are drilled, how quickly production ramps up, how much of the resource can be recovered and whether the project makes money at all. I’m Jeff Parke, and this is From Basin to Balance Sheet — the integrated story of how a geological possibility becomes an investment, a producing asset and, eventually, a retirement obligation.

10. 

    2 Aug 2026

    Designing Wells for Value

    The well is the point where geology becomes production capacity. Its productivity determines how many wells must be drilled, how large the facilities need to be, how quickly the field reaches plateau and how soon revenue begins to repay the investment. Its behaviour can also determine how much water must be processed, how much reservoir energy is wasted and how much oil is ultimately left behind.

11. 

    24 Jul 2026

    What makes fluids move?

    The seismic interpretation looks convincing. The appraisal wells have produced economic hydrocarbons. The volumetric range is large enough to excite people. There is already talk of plateau rates, export routes and first production dates. But one question now matters more than almost any other: How will the reservoir actually behave once we start producing it? A discovery, no matter how large, is automatically a development. Oil and gas do not appear at the surface simply because we have proved they exist underground. They have to move through the reservoir, enter the wells, rise through the tubing, pass through the facilities and reach a market. They must do that at useful rates, for long enough, to repay the investment. Reservoir dynamics is the point where a static description of the field becomes a moving system. Pressure falls. Fluids expand. Gas, oil and water begin to compete for the same pore space. The reservoir starts to reveal which parts are connected, which parts are poorly swept and which assumptions in the development plan were too optimistic. The consequences reach far beyond reservoir engineering: well count, injection, facility capacity, water handling, compression, plateau length and ultimately project value.

12. 

    24 Jul 2026

    Appraisal and the Value of Information

    So far in this series, we’ve followed the upstream journey from exploration to drilling and the excitement of making a discovery. It is three o’clock in the morning on a drilling rig. For weeks, the drill bit has been working its way through kilometres of rock, following a target first imagined from seismic reflections and geological history. Then the signs begin to change. Gas readings rise. The cuttings show oil staining. Pressure measurements confirm that the well has entered a hydrocarbon-bearing reservoir. For the people on the rig, and for the team watching from an office hundreds or thousands of kilometres away, this is the moment they have been waiting for. A discovery. But discovery is not the same thing as a field. A single well is a pinprick through a structure that may extend for many kilometres. It tells us that hydrocarbons exist at one location. It does not tell us, with anything like the confidence needed to invest billions, how far the reservoir extends, how its quality changes, whether faults divide it into separate compartments, or how quickly the oil or gas can be produced. The business problem has just become much harder. And that is where appraisal begins.

13. 

    24 Jul 2026

    The Size of the Prize

    In the last episode, we explored the reservoir itself — porosity, permeability, pressure, fluids and the geological properties that determine whether hydrocarbons can actually flow. But today we move into one of the most commercially important questions in the entire upstream business: How much oil and gas is actually there? Because finding hydrocarbons is not enough. Companies need to estimate how much exists in the ground, how much can be recovered, and how uncertain those estimates really are. Those estimates influence almost everything: Share prices.Field developments.Investment decisions.Company valuations.Government revenues.And billion-dollar infrastructure projects. Today’s episode is about volumetric estimation — the science, engineering and statistics behind estimating hydrocarbons in place and recoverable resources.

14. 

    23 Jul 2026

    Understanding the Reservoir

    So far in this series, we’ve followed the upstream journey from exploration to drilling, and then into safety and environmental management. But drilling a well is only part of the story. Once the well reaches the target, a new set of questions begins. How much oil or gas is actually present?Will it flow?At what rate?Under what pressure?How connected is the reservoir?And how much of the oil or gas can realistically be recovered? Today’s episode is about the reservoir itself. Because a hydrocarbon accumulation is not simply an underground storage tank. It is a complex geological system made of rock, fluids, pressure and flow pathways — and understanding that system is what allows companies to turn a discovery into a producing asset.

15. 

    5 Jun 2026

    Safety, the Environment and Risk

    Today, we move into a topic that sits underneath every part of the upstream industry. Safety.

16. 

    31 May 2026

    From Prospect to Wellbore

    Today’s episode is about drilling engineering: how the upstream industry connects a subsurface target to a production facility – with a wellbore.

17. 

    27 May 2026

    Exploration

    Exploration. Imagining and then finding hydrocarbons

18. 

    27 May 2026

    The Field Life Cycle

    The life of an oil or gas field can be thought of in five broad stages: exploration, appraisal, development, production, and decommissioning. These are not simply different technical phases, but as phases driven by different business needs.

Reach and audience

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Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

4 ratings

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Guest appearances

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