Oil and gas deal screening: put the seller's type curve on trial

A buy-side oil and gas deal is not short of numbers. It is short of proof.

A bolt-on package arrives as an offering memo, a seller type curve, a lease list, a stack of AFEs, and a model built on all of it. The economics hang on one figure: how much each well will produce over its life. Everything downstream, the bid, the return, the committee vote, rests on that single EUR-per-well number. And the number was built to sell.

So the committee asks the question that decides the deal: where did that number come from?

Why the type curve is not enough

A seller's type curve is an argument, not a measurement. It is usually assembled from the best-performing part of the play, smoothed, and extended past any well's real track record. None of that is dishonest. It is just optimistic, and the optimism is invisible unless you can set the curve against something harder.

The harder thing already exists. Every well drilled near the deal has been reported to the regulator, month by month, for its entire life. In many jurisdictions that record is public. The problem is not that the evidence is missing. The problem is that it is scattered across thousands of filings, and nobody has the four working days it would take to pull it together before the committee meets.

The fence and the jury

SubsurfaceOS screens the deal in two moves.

The fence. Define the acreage and the target bench. The system pulls every offset well inside that boundary straight from the public production record: location, first production, and monthly volumes, with the source and vintage of each record kept intact. It takes the whole neighbourhood, not a curated set of type wells, including the ones a seller would rather leave out of the average.

The jury. The offset wells judge the seller's claim. The type curve is laid over them at the same age, so a two-year-old deal well is compared against two-year-old offsets, not against a decade of cumulative production. Three things come out of that comparison, and they are kept apart on purpose:

• Supported. Offsets that track the seller's curve at age.
• Below the curve. Offsets, often the infill wells drilled close to an older parent, that sit under the seller's EUR shape at the same age.
• Untested. Inventory the seller counts as value but that no well, permit, or spacing test has yet proven.

These are not blended into one score. A blended score hides the disagreement a buyer needs to see. The verdict is a reading of the three, made by a named person: walk away, offer less, or advance.

People judge, the software builds the case

The software gathers the offsets, aligns the curves, retrieves the records, and keeps watch. It does not decide. Your reservoir engineer reads the decline. Your geologist reads the bench. Your analyst reads the economics. SubsurfaceOS records who judged what, where the offsets back the seller and where they do not, and preserves the disagreement rather than smoothing it away. The accountability stays with the people who sign the bid.

The verdict survives new evidence

Production does not stop after the deal is priced, so the screen should not either. A few months on, new monthly volumes are published, and the deal wells are tracking at, say, 74 percent of the seller curve rather than 100. SubsurfaceOS shows exactly which claims, assumptions, and bids that change touches, and sends them back for review. The old verdict stays in history with its full reasoning. The new one is reasoned from the change, not rebuilt from scratch.

Why this runs on public data

Screening on the public record, rather than the operator's deck, is the point. It is self-serve: a buyer can run it without waiting on the seller. It is defensible: every claim traces back to a public filing anyone can check. And it is honest about what is proven versus what is hoped, which is the distinction a type curve is designed to blur.

The memorandum a committee reads is one rendering of the work. The screen itself, the offsets, the comparison, the untested inventory, the sign-off, is the product. What a buyer walks into committee with is a number they can defend at any table.

Oil and gas deal screening is the first live configuration of SubsurfaceOS, running on public production records. The same workflow, from evidence to claims to review to a decision you can revise, is what the platform is built to carry into the next subsurface decision it takes on.

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