September 29, 2025
Field Development, Rebuilt: Human-First, AI-Powered Decisions
Why these decisions matter
Field Development Planning (FDP) decisions are among the biggest calls in the Oil & Gas industry. A single development can tie up hundreds of millions - often billions - of dollars and shape outcomes for decades. Choices cascade: concept selection depends on dozens of interdependent sub-decisions, all made with imperfect subsurface knowledge. The stakes are high for operators, partners and host nations. Reputations ride on the quality of the call.
In short: FDP is both complex and critical.
The gap between what we need and how we decide
Before committing, leaders want confidence that they’ve explored the option space, tested robustness to uncertainty, and understood trade-offs across ultimate recovery, value, cost, safety and schedule.
Reality is harsher. Decision support is too often slow, siloed and partial. Teams are forced into shortcuts, leaving value on the table and risks hidden in the plan.
The trap: tools that force shortcuts
The core problem is not a lack of data or expertise - it’s tooling and process that can’t keep up with the complexity.
Common shortcuts include:
Evaluating only a small subset of integrated concepts, tested against a handful of subsurface scenarios.
“Fixing” key levers early (e.g., well count, drilling schedule), instead of flexing them across outcomes.
Relying on a few deterministic cases for schedule, cost or price - when the real world is a web of “what-ifs.”
Spending weeks per economic run, killing iteration and curiosity when they’re needed most.
These shortcuts normalize blind spots. They create business risks: delayed partner/government approvals, deferred production from inflexible concepts, and oversized facilities that burn capital. The cumulative impact? Tens of millions in lost value, avoidable schedule slips, and eroded credibility.
A better way: human-first, AI-powered FDP
What good looks like is simple to say and hard to do: explore the full set of development choices across the full range of uncertainty - quickly - so teams can compare trade-offs transparently and align with confidence.
That’s the point of our human-first, AI-powered approach:
Explore broadly. Systematically generate and evaluate thousands of viable concepts and schedules - not just a handful.
Optimise what matters. Tune for the drivers you care about (value, recovery, emissions, safety, schedule resilience) and see the consequences clearly.
Stress-test for reality. Assess robustness across subsurface, price and execution uncertainty instead of betting on a single “most likely” case.
Decide together. Use a fit-for-purpose interface where planners, subsurface, wells, facilities and leadership can see the same evidence, interrogate trade-offs and converge.
How it works in practice
We translate FDP into a navigable decision space. Modern AI then does what it does best: search vast option spaces to find strong candidates, quickly.
Practically, that means:
Structured option generation: Well targets and trajectories, template configuration, SURF routing, drilling sequences, facility sizing - each varied within engineering constraints.
Integrated evaluation: Techno-economic scoring across value, cost, schedule, recovery, risk and (where relevant) carbon.
Adaptive schedules: The plan flexes - well counts and drill order adjust with outcomes instead of being fixed up front.
Transparent trade-offs: Shortlists of frontrunners with side-by-side comparisons, sensitivity views and “what-if” toggles (e.g., exploration success cases, price bands, rig sequence changes).
The result: weeks of work distilled into hours or days - without sacrificing nuance. Teams move from opinion to evidence, from static choice to resilient strategy.
“But can this work on real fields?”
Yes - if you start with the decisions in mind. You don’t need full dynamic simulation for every permutation to polarise choices.
The principle: simplify without dumbing down, and reserve high-fidelity effort for the few contenders that warrant it.
Why this is different
Speed with substance: You don’t trade rigour for pace - you unlock both.
Clarity over complexity: One evidence base, one interface, shared language for trade-offs.
Confidence at the gate: Stronger submissions to partners and host governments; fewer surprises in execution.
Value realised, not theorised: Leaner concepts, resilient schedules, right-sized facilities - and fewer painful reworks later.
Get unstuck
As an industry, we’ve adapted to slow tools and accepted incomplete analyses. It doesn’t have to be this way. If you care about your bottom line - and your licence to operate - challenge the shortcuts.
At WhiteSpace Solutions, we build human-centred, AI-powered decision tools that turn months of manual iteration into days of confident progress.
If you’d like to see it in action, we are happy to demo our interactive field development solutions or bring us a real case. We’ll meet you where you are - and help you move from complexity to clarity.