Every asset team's best idea wins its own study, because none of them carry a cost or a probability. Ranked properly, the ordering usually inverts.
Opportunities arrive as gross uplift. Recover an extra two hundred thousand barrels. Add eight percent to throughput. Each number is defensible on its own terms and each was produced by a team that believes in it.
Two things are missing from all of them, and they are the two things that determine whether the idea is worth doing. What it costs, and how likely it is to work. Without those, ranking is by headline size, which systematically favours large capital projects over cheap commercial fixes.
The inversion is routine once you correct it. A marketing or contract renegotiation costing nothing, with even moderate odds, frequently outranks a nine-figure refrac programme with a coin-flip chance of working. It never wins the argument in a meeting, because it does not sound like an achievement.
There is a subtler failure underneath. Ideas evaluated one at a time against a base case cannot see each other. Two improvements that both relieve the same constraint are not additive, and a model that tests them separately will happily approve both and book the benefit twice.
Count the odds. Look at the opportunity list. How many entries carry a probability? If the answer is none, the list is sorted by enthusiasm.
Count the costs. Same question. An uplift without its capital attached is not a proposal, it is an observation.
Check whether they were tested together. Re-run the model with every approved opportunity active at once and compare the total against the sum of the individual cases. A gap means they were competing for the same constraint.
Price and risk every line. Risked value is the probability of success times the change in value, less the capital required. It is not a sophisticated formula. It is just the one nobody applies consistently.
Workshop the odds with the people who would execute. Not with finance. The crew that has attempted this three times before has the only useful prior, and they will tell you if you ask them in a room rather than in a form.
Re-run the whole model for each one. Testing an opportunity by adjusting a line in a summary tab misses every interaction. Running the full model catches the case where the benefit is already capped by something else.
We have seen a gas lift conversion return exactly nothing on this test, not because gas lift does not work, but because the recovery cap on those wells already bound. Flattening the tail moved no barrels. That is invisible without a model that carries the constraint.
An Asset Health Check finds this one on a producing asset in two weeks, fixed fee.
The Asset Health Check is the cheapest possible way to find out whether we are worth the larger engagement. Two weeks, fixed fee, and a written answer either way.