Re-using existing infrastructure has become a standard approach for the development of marginal offshore oil fields. Many small discoveries are, however, located in remote areas or require unreasonably high costs to be tied back to already installed production facilities. Feasible solutions must be found to develop such prospects in a cost-efficient way. In this paper, we analyze whether sequential development of two stand-alone small fields (A and B) using the same production facilities can be an economical strategy compared to the investment in parallel development. We apply and compare two different approaches to evaluate such a sequential strategy. The first considers that the decision maker maximizes the recovery factor of Field A first and then invests in Field B disregarding the information about uncertain factors (“myopic” approach). The second approach allows accounting for the decision maker’s ability to optimize the development strategy given it can learn about uncertainties over time and initiate switching between two fields when it is optimal, or leave Field B undeveloped (“options” approach). We account for several sources of uncertainty affecting the project value: Fields A and B reservoir uncertainty that is replicated by a benchmark reservoir model, oil price, operational expenditure (OPEX), and capital expenditure (CAPEX) to switch between two fields. Our findings are threefold: (1) sequential investment can be the preferred development concept for small stand-alone discoveries; (2) the sequential development strategy allows the downside risks of the investment to be partly hedged, including the reservoir, oil price, and cost risks; (3) the “options” approach is needed to capture the additional monetary value of such a strategy and is considered to be a superior method to assess the value of the sequential production as opposed to a “myopic” approach.

重新利用现有基础设施已成为开发边缘海上油田的标准方法。然而，许多小发现位于偏远地区，或者需要不合理的高成本才能与已安装的生产设施挂钩。必须找到可行的解决方案，以具有成本效益的方式开发这种前景。在本文中，我们分析了与并行开发的投资相比，使用相同的生产设施顺序开发两个独立的小油田（A 和 B）是否是一种经济的策略。我们应用并比较了两种不同的方法来评估这种顺序策略。第一种认为决策者首先最大化领域 A 的恢复因子，然后投资于领域 B，而不考虑有关不确定因素的信息（“短视”方法）。第二种方法考虑到决策者优化开发战略的能力，因为它可以了解随着时间的推移的不确定性，并在最佳情况下开始在两个领域之间切换，或者让领域 B 未开发（“选项”方法）。我们考虑了影响项目价值的几个不确定性来源：由基准油藏模型复制的油田 A 和 B 油藏不确定性、油价、运营支出 (OPEX) 和资本支出 (CAPEX)，以在两个油田之间切换。我们的发现有三个方面：（1）顺序投资可以成为小型独立发现的首选开发概念；（2）循序渐进的发展策略可以部分对冲投资的下行风险，包括油藏、油价、成本风险；