Challenge

Field Development

Oil drilling rig operating in a desert landscape with surrounding water reservoirs and equipment

The challenge

Field development planning is one of the most critical and costly stages in upstream projects. Decisions on well trajectories, facility layouts, drilling centers, and flowlines lock in billions of dollars of investment and shape production and risk for decades.

Challenge

Field Development

The challenge

Challenge

Field Development

The challenge

Why it's complex

Limited exploration of options

Manual workflows mean only a handful of well trajectory and facility combinations can be tested before key decision milestones.

Competing trade-offs

Drilling risk, capital investment, ultimate recovery, and schedule must be balanced under geological and market uncertainty.

High stakes for value and confidence

A suboptimal concept can erode lifecycle value and delay sanctioning, while leadership must commit billions with incomplete visibility.

Why it's complex

Limited exploration of options

Manual workflows mean only a handful of well trajectory and facility combinations can be tested before key decision milestones.

Competing trade-offs

Drilling risk, capital investment, ultimate recovery, and schedule must be balanced under geological and market uncertainty.

High stakes for value and confidence

A suboptimal concept can erode lifecycle value and delay sanctioning, while leadership must commit billions with incomplete visibility.

Why it's complex

Limited exploration of options

Manual workflows mean only a handful of well trajectory and facility combinations can be tested before key decision milestones.

Competing trade-offs

Drilling risk, capital investment, ultimate recovery, and schedule must be balanced under geological and market uncertainty.

High stakes for value and confidence

A suboptimal concept can erode lifecycle value and delay sanctioning, while leadership must commit billions with incomplete visibility.

Illustration of offshore oil platforms with subsea infrastructure and color-mapped reservoir simulations beneath the seabed.

How WhiteSpace helps

WhiteSpace brings AI-assisted design and optimisation to field development planning. Using our AIM toolkit, we can explore miliions of well, layout, and routing options in hours rather than months, revealing trade-offs between cost, risk, and value that would otherwise stay hidden.

This approach has already delivered multi-million-dollar savings and enabled weeks-to-months faster DG2 decisions. By making options transparent and quantifying the impact of every choice, we give project teams and leadership the clarity and confidence to select resilient concepts and move forward at pace.

The result: faster maturation, lower CAPEX, and robust field developments that stand up to uncertainty and maximise long-term value.