Uncertainty Is the Only Constant in Energy

Over the past few months, my travels across APAC and the Middle East regions have given me a front-row seat to some of the most fascinating conversations in our industry.

I’ve had the privilege of interacting with reservoir and production engineers, people whose daily work shapes the future of energy. We spoke about how they make field development decisions and forecast outcomes, whether for oil and gas projects or carbon storage initiatives.

What stood out was the depth of thinking behind every decision.

Every model is a balance of countless variables—geological uncertainties, fluid behaviour, geomechanics, geochemistry. The same rigor applies to those designing wells and facilities, ensuring production under unpredictable conditions.

Why this level of expertise?  

Because, as our CEO Pramod Jain once said so aptly, ‘it is like working with a blindfold on.’

We are making billion-dollar decisions based on what lies beneath the surface - something we can never fully see.    These conversations took me back to my own experience with  high-value completion technologies. If there’s one truth in our industry, it’s this: uncertainty is everywhere. Take a single completion job. It involves meticulous planning by multidisciplinary teams:

• Completion engineers design the hardware and the job.
• Fluids experts craft precise fluid recipes.
• Subsurface teams predict geological conditions as best as possible.

We do everything right, and uncertainty still shows up.

• The subsurface team predicts formation pressure and permeability accurately, and the completion design accounts for expected drawdown. Yet an unexpected fault causes a fluid loss or a kick.
• Completion tools are tested and certified for downhole conditions. Yet a packer fails to set because debris interferes, despite verified hole cleaning.
• Fluids are designed for compatibility. Yet a slight variation in formation water chemistry triggers scale precipitation or emulsion formation.
• Even logistics are planned in detail. Yet sudden storm delays critical equipment, forcing improvisation or suspension of operations.

Each of these scenarios can cost millions over a job that lasts days or weeks.     Now scale that to decades, and stakes in the hundreds of millions or even billions.

That’s the reality of field development planning.

Uncertainty doesn’t just exist, it compounds over time. 

That’s why long-term planning is so challenging, and why it has shaped how we think about decision-making at Computer Modelling Group, alongside our industry partners. Over the years, we’ve invested in tools for integrated, end-to-end uncertainty management and optimization.

A recent deepwater study in Brazil brought this to life. 

The development involved combining two reservoirs, one already producing with an existing FPSO, and another being developed, with a transition to a new common FPSO. The challenge was to understand how design choices, capacity limits, and timing decisions would impact the overall development.

What became clear was this: outcomes are not driven by individual uncertainties alone, but by how they interact.

• Interdependencies matter: FPSO water capacity combined with Oil Processing capacity and riser diameter, create compounded effects on production bottlenecks.
• Time changes everything: Constraints evolve. Oil handling capacity may limit early production, while water handling becomes critical later. Even the timing of switching FPSOs or bringing new wells online can significantly impact recovery. The same concept also applied in this case for timing of opening and activation of new wells.
• Integration reduces risk: Modeling these interactions together enables better decisions upfront and avoids costly changes later. In this case, capturing these effects translated into a potential value uplift of ~USD 2 billion.

In a system like this, small uncertainties don’t stay small. They interact, evolve, and amplify over time.

And that’s the real challenge.

In a high-stakes, capital-intensive industry like ours, success isn’t about having the perfect design on paper.

It’s about making better decisions, despite the uncertainty.