Hundreds of newly discovered or previously appraised but undeveloped UKCS fields are small. As standalone developments, many of these fields are economically unviable. Meanwhile to extend the term of exploration and production activities in the mature UKCS province, the UK government and allied institutions have renewed focus on maximising economic recovery (MER). To this end, a significant aspect of the strategy should be to unlock the potential of small, undeveloped and economically marginal UKCS fields. From the standpoint of operators, clustering these fields into unit developments with shared communal infrastructure is an innovative way of reducing development and operating expenditures through economies of scale, hence enhancing their economic viability. We develop a detailed mathematical optimisation model to examine the potential of cluster developments in unlocking the economic viability of marginal UKCS fields. We find that relative to standalone developments, cluster developments offer a unique opportunity to unlock the economic potential of many of these fields. At the existing levels of costs, prices and taxation, cluster developments facilitate the unlocking of up to 8.70 times the value from standalone developments in post-tax net present value (NPV) terms, with about $18.05 billion in total NPV to be unlocked across the UKCS province. This is higher in pre-tax NPV terms, with cluster developments facilitating the unlocking of up to $36.97 billion across the province, compared to only $7.76 billion for standalone developments. Further analysis show that the economics of the marginal fields exhibit significant sensitivity to market oil and gas prices. However, in terms of actions that are in investors' direct control, use of clustering as a cost reduction strategy would likely make the most significant difference if the MER goal in the UKCS province is to be realised.

数以百计的新发现或先前评估但未开发的UKCS油田很小。作为独立的发展，这些领域中的许多在经济上都是不可行的。同时，为了延长在成熟的UKCS省的勘探和生产活动的期限，英国政府和相关机构已重新关注最大化经济复苏（MER）。为此，该战略的重要方面应该是挖掘小型，未开发且经济上处于边缘地位的UKCS油田的潜力。从运营商的角度来看，将这些领域聚集到具有共享公共基础设施的单元开发中，是一种通过规模经济来减少开发和运营支出的创新方法，从而增强了其经济可行性。我们开发了详细的数学优化模型，以研究集群发展在释放边缘UKCS领域的经济可行性方面的潜力。我们发现，相对于独立开发，集群开发提供了释放许多这些领域的经济潜力的独特机会。以现有的成本，价格和税收水平，集群开发可以使独立开发的税后净现值（NPV）值解锁多达8.70倍，整个开发中的总NPV约为180.5亿美元。 UKCS省。以税前净现值计算，这一数字更高，集群开发为全省最多解锁了369.7亿加元，而独立开发仅为77.6亿加元。进一步的分析表明，边际油田的经济表现出对市场石油和天然气价格的显着敏感性。但是，就投资者直接控制的行动而言，如果要实现UKCS省的MER目标，将集群作为降低成本的策略可能会产生最大的影响。