Project Economics in the Big-Bets Industry: The Integrated Valuation in Practice

Value creation from petroleum projects is uncertain. Yet, even with great odds of failure, companies increasingly take on these ventures. Here, no analytics could cut failures out. We could only avoid loss by avoiding poor investment decisions. In practice, most valuations use inconsistent principles that potentially obscure the value–maximizing decisions. For example, when drilling for hydrocarbons most firms decide which opportunity to drill based on their expected value—calculated from values of multiple outcomes, each with different levels of uncertainty but traditionally evaluated with a single discount rate. The all-inclusive discounting could lead to biases and poor decisions. In this paper, we discuss the shortcomings of the traditional approach and implement a coherent method of integrated valuation that, while more detailed, excels in valuation of uncertain investments.