Dundas

Project Management

Overview

At Dundas, we believe that opportunities to unlock additional value from projects often lie at the interfaces between the engineering and commercial functions. The Dundas team has considerable experience of Process Engineering and Project Economics: both roles are associated with coordination and integration of input from disciplines across the a business. This positions Dundas ideally for supporting project teams and for helping to identify, quantify and liberate value for our customers at the Asses, Select and Define stages. 

Development Engineering & Project Management

Dundas has helped its clients in the following areas:

• Option identification and screening
• Preparation of key project documentation such as, Terms of Reference, Scope of Work, Basis of Design, Statement of Requirements, Decision Support Package, Project Execution Plan
• Preparation of Technical Work Scopes
• Provision of stage gated process expertise
• Peer Reviews/Value Assurance Reviews
• Embedding experienced staff into client teams
• Decision Process Support
• Development of bespoke integrated asset models
• Coordination of activity across departments

Why Dundas?

Dundas specialises in high added value client support delivered by experienced consultants within or leading client teams. We prioritise flexibility and responsiveness.

Training

Dundas offers industry leading training in project management and Decision and Risk Analysis (DRA). Contact us for a bespoke in-house course, or enrol on a multi-client course.

Peer Reviews

Dundas provides peer and value assurance review facilitation to provide guidance to project teams and add value to your opportunities. Our peer reviews are structured to cover the whole project:

• Technical
• Economic
• Commercial
• Organisational
• Political

Recent examples include:

• Select to Define gate: reconfiguration of a major onshore gas terminal
• Appraise to Select gate: $2bln field development feasibility studies
• Select to Define gate: £150mln late life asset redevelopment

Project Framing

Overview

Project framing is now used widely as part of E&P project decision quality processes. Dundas has developed a set of workshop tools that can be applied to any project. Our project framing workshops will assist your teams to: 

• Achieve a shared and current view of the project across all disciplines.
• Have a clear understanding of the project goals and value drivers.
• Build work programmes enabling key decisions to be made on time.
• Understand project risks and opportunities.
• Develop clear alternative strategies and understand their impact on the business objectives.
• Clarify the project boundaries.
• Prioritise and plan stakeholder management

Recent Examples

Dundas has participated in, designed and facilitated a large number of opportunity framing workshops. Here is a selection of recent examples:         

• Major Oil Terminal Redevelopment Strategy
• Southern North Sea Gas Evacuation Strategy
• Business Review to Decide on Operating Model for Gas Asset
• Carbon Capture and Storage Project Concept Select Studies
• Subsea tie-back to East Irish Sea NUI
• Central North Sea subsea tie-back
• Mature asset life extension project
• FPSO redevelopment project
• CO₂ flood EOR project

Late Life & Decommissioning

Overview

Dundas has established a track record of providing outstanding commercial and technical advisory services in the areas of late life asset management and decommissioning.

Experience

Dundas has delivered over 30 late life and decommissioning studies including:

• Project framing - systematic approach to setting goals, scope and priorities
• Probabilistic decommissioning cost estimate - delivering real insight on the range of potential cost outcomes, integrating the cost estimate and project risk register in a Monte Carlo simulation
• Decommissioning securities agreement - expert delivery of net value calculations, origination or independent expert review
• Late life strategy - integrating discounted cashflow modelling, decision and risk analysis and multi-discipline scenario forecasting to identify maximum value and or minimum cost strategies
• Contract review - proposing where contract risk is best allocated to deliver optimal contractual performance in the supply chain philosophy
• Pairwise comparison - systematic comparison of alternatives
• Other - origination of option selection reports, conducting peer reviews, preparation of peer review guidelines, conducting decision analysis and provision of risk reviews

Training

Excellence in Early Stage Projects

The Dundas team has worked with its major energy company clients to develop an outstanding training offering focussing on creating value through excellence in early stage projects. The training course is structured into the following themes.

Stage Gated Project Delivery

1. Stage gated project delivery
2. Project framing
3. Excellence in the Select phase
4. Behaviours in Select phase
5. Optimisation of selected options

Decision Theory

1. Decision quality analysis
2. Cost benefit analysis
3. Bias in decision making
4. Decision trees
5. Value of information
6. Sensitivity analysis

Project Management

1. Cost estimation
2. Schedule estimation

Project Economics

Overview

The Dundas team has extensive Project Economics expertise gained in consulting and operating company positions.

Project Economics & Decision Support

Dundas provides the following services for its clients:

• Project evaluations
• Preparation of investment papers
• Model building
• Quality Assurance & Peer Review
• Asset/Hub/Area/Country strategy development
• Portfolio reviews
• End of Project Life planning
• Risk & Uncertainty analysis including Monte Carlo simulation
• Secondment of experienced staff into client teams
• Exploration and appraisal support

Business Planning

Business planning deadlines are uncompromising. Dundas consultants can hit the ground running to help your team to deliver:

• Portfolio planning
• Reserves Booking
• PRMS Economic Limit Test and Standardised Measure
• Schedule optimisation

Training

Project economics training empowers professionals from a wide range of disciplines and lets them engage with decision makers using their language. Dundas offers project economics training programmes that consistently achieve 90%+ approval ratings.

Fundamentals of Project Economics & Risk

Target Audience - Who Should Attend

Those working in companies that make capital investments in projects, or that provide services to those companies and wish to have a stronger impact on business performance. The course has previously been completed by professionals working in engineering, management, tax, finance, commercial, sales, marketing and other roles.

Learning Outcomes

The course will introduce you to the economic analysis of capital project investment opportunities in the context of risk and uncertainty, providing you with the knowledge, language and tools to improve your commercial business awareness and to sharpen your focus on value creation. The course will enable you to:

• Engage with decision makers using their language
• Calculate the profitability of a project with confidence
• Understand and evaluate project risk
• Calculate and understand the role of taxation in projects
• Calculate project performance metrics such as IRR and NPV with confidence

Method of Delivery   

Face to face learning for two days, or live face to face via Microsoft Teams. Prereading is provided. Most topics include worked example tutorials to be completed in Microsoft Excel to fully embed the learning in the topic. Online quizzes are included to make the sessions more interactive and fun.

Accreditation  

This course is fully accredited by the Institution of Chemical Engineers

Course Outline   

• The role of the project economist
• Inflation, nominal, real terms money
• The time value of money, risk and discounting
• Discounted cash flows
• Project economic metrics
• Project taxation
• Evaluation of incremental projects
• Decommissioning economics
• Bias in decision making
• Introduction to decision trees
• Value of information
• IRR in acceleration projects
• Sensitivity analysis

Course Presenter  

The course will be presented by Richard Woodhouse. Richard holds a degree in Chemical Engineering from Heriot Watt university. He has 26 years’ experience in process industries combining process engineering and project economics roles. Richard spent eight years at Shell where he was the project investment analyst for a number of major assets and capital projects prior to leading a large project economics team providing senior management with decision support for all of the Shell operated assets in Europe. Richard is a Director at Dundas and is very active in project economics and chemical engineering consultancy. Richard has trained over 500 engineers, scientists, managers and other professionals in the subject of project economics and risk analysis. A key focus for Richard is to make the training experience engaging, hands-on, and based on real world project experience. The excellent customer feedback, typically exceeding 90% satisfaction, and resulting in a large volume of repeat business is the main motivation for the continued improvement and delivery of the course.  

How to Book a Place 

Simply email us at info@dundasconsultants.com and we'll get you enrolled.

Drilling Schedule Optimisation

Unlock Value by Optimising Your Drilling Schedule.

Our optimisation and analysis software uses a proprietary genetic algorithm to generate schedules maximising value, production or the addition of proved reserves. In addition, our tools enable operators to catalogue schedules and quantify the business impact of their decisions.

Background

Major EP companies need to create and maintain a drilling schedule for a large number of drill strings. The objective is to maximise value, production or reserves from limited resources of cash and rigs/crews. The task is complicated by the following factors:

• the data is highly dynamic
• the data is subject to uncertainty
• business priorities can change

For any significant activity levels, it is impossible to optimise this manually or by inspection. The Dundas tools contain a powerful proprietary optimisation algorithm developed to handle the complex scheduling problem faced in the operation of regional development programmes. The tool may be used to automatically optimise drilling schedules:

• Select best projects to be executed
• Determine best chronological order
• Comply with all business constraints

The optimiser objective function can be either:

• Value, or
• Production build-up, or
• Proved reserves additions (PRA)

Functionality

The Dundas schedule optimiser will complement existing schedule planning processes, and currently has the following functionality:

• automated schedule optimisation using a genetic algorithm;
• schedule evaluation in terms of NPV, cashflow, expenditure profiles, production build-up profiles and proved reserves addition profiles;
• cataloguing of manually entered and automatically generated schedules;
• parametric evaluations to quantify the business impact of key sensitivities – e.g. CAPEX availability, string time performance, rig availability;
• formatted business reports, showing a digest of schedule information and allowing quantitative comparison of alternative schedules.

Constraints

Our tools enable compliance with all of your business constraints, e.g.:

• Earliest possible spud date
• Latest acceptable end date
• Project precedence
• Capital availability per annum
• Number of rigs per rig category
• Rig availability windows

Contact Dundas

Recruitment

Dundas is currently hiring Development Engineers, Petroleum Economists, Reservoir Engineers, Petroleum Engineers and Geoscientists. At Dundas you will be part of a winning team and can expect strong support and strong challenge from your colleagues.

If you have a track record of academic and professional excellence, the drive to succeed and the relationship skills required to exceed customer expectations then Dundas would like to hear from you. We can offer rewarding project assignments, city centre working and industry leading remuneration packages. To be considered, please use the contact form below. Alternatively, send your CV to info@dundasconsultants.com.