Building Trust through Accuracy: ComboCurve’s Impact on Enbridge Wexpro’s Forecasting and Investment

“Whenever I’m trying to justify software, it comes from the view that we’re in this incredible capitally intensive industry and making one marginally better decision, you’ve paid for your software. As long as you actually utilize it, it doesn’t take very many decisions to pay for something like ComboCurve.”

– Brooks Black, Supervisor of Reservoir Engineer, Enbridge Wexpro   

Discrepancies in Reporting Led to Capital Inefficiencies

Brooks Black, Supervisor of Reservoir Engineering at Enbridge Wexpro, is an engineer with a background in economics, and a numbers and data guy through and through. He noted that reporting carried out on legacy platforms was often qualitative and lacked rigorous error characterization. “When people would ask ‘how confident are you in your forecasts?’ Our response was ‘Well, we’ve been pretty conservative here,’ but there was never any rigorous attempt to error characterization.” Brooks found it unusual that people would manually forecast PDP in an acquisition setting without conveying the error expected in their forecasts to decision-makers.  

“I would want to convey what sort of error that we would expect in our forecast to the decision makers. If you have a bunch of subjective forecasting in there, you don’t have anything. You don’t have anything reproducible, and you don’t have any way to estimate how wrong you expect to be. It really leads to kind of a paralysis in industry from an A&D perspective.”  – Brooks Black, Supervisor of Reservoir Engineering, Enbridge Wexpro 

Without data-backed decisions, reliance on intuition made it hard to agree on discount rates. Especially when hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake. This approach often resulted in fewer deals at lower prices and significant capital destruction. Over-forecasting and low discount further compounded the issue. This destroys investor trust and making it difficult to secure funding for oil and gas projects. “And now, even with energy transition notwithstanding, people are reluctant to give oil and gas money because they don’t trust us after we destroyed so much capital.”

 

 

Intuition vs. Data 

Using ComboCurve has since helped shift Enbridge to a more data-driven forecasting approach. Ensuring forecasts are based on solid data and empirical analysis rather than just intuition has improved forecasting accuracy and provided a strong foundation for decision-making.  

“All the tools that we use end up being manifestations of our intuition. But it’s also a feedback loop. Our intuition is going to play into the way that we do that work and get the results. From a Bayesian perspective, we integrate that into our workflow and integrate that into our intuition.”  

– Brooks Black   

This integration of data and intuition has created a robust forecasting methodology. 

 

 

Enbridge’s Current Tech Stack 

Enbridge primarily leverages ComboCurve for rapid analysis and error characterization. “I’ve been really intrigued by auto-forecasting as a way to lower time obviously. But more importantly, as a way to characterize your error.” Brooks explains.  

 

While Enbridge has achieved good results with ComboCurve’s economic engine, they continue to rely on ARIES for economic outputs due to familiarity and established workflows. However, they see a future transition to ComboCurve’s economic engine as inevitable.  

“I want to start running more econ with it just so we can start having that conversation to be consistent, so that when things eventually switch over as we anticipate, the transition will be seamless for us. Brooks added, “With y’all’s support and the more intuitive nature of it, I would much rather work in ComboCurve. I just think it’s far better, far more nimble.” 

This flexibility is supported by ComboCurve’s bidirectionality with ARIES, facilitating a smooth transition. 

 

   

Rebuilding Stakeholder Trust Through Data-Driven Decisions 

Reporting to Enbridges stakeholders and investors now centers on building trust backed by data. By incorporating error characterization into their forecasts with ComboCurve, Enbridge presents more reliable data, improving trust and transparency.  

“ComboCurve is less subjective and more based on the numbers, which is nice. It makes me more comfortable as an engineer to know that there’s a decision being made based on numbers, and less about my gut.”

– Darin Oberg, Sr Staff Reservoir Engineer, Enbridge Wexpro   

The focus on accuracy and repeatable insights plays a crucial role in preventing significant capital losses in the industry.