Decisions Overview

The Decisions feature helps teams bridge the gap between asset development and economic evaluation. It enables companies to define the key economic drivers that shape evaluation results—such as development area, completion design, and lateral length—and apply those drivers consistently across their well inventory.

By using Decisions, evaluators can:

Distill complex inputs into manageable choices that reflect how wells are developed and generate economic results
Build and compare development scenarios based on meaningful variations in these choices
Rapidly update large well inventories with planned development assumptions, without manually adjusting underlying economics for each well

For example, a decision like Completion Design can determine which capital model is applied, while a decision like Lateral Length can scale drilling costs accordingly. Together, these decisions create a flexible structure for modeling what-if scenarios or aligning asset economics with current development plans.

Lookup Matching & Scaling

At the core of the Decisions feature is a powerful mechanism for aligning well-level assumptions with economic inputs: lookup matching and scaling.

In Val Nav, capital and operating cost lookups can be configured to represent specific development choices—such as Completion Design or Development Area—by associating each with one or more Decision values. When a well is modeled with a matching set of Decisions, Val Nav automatically applies the corresponding lookup, ensuring inputs reflect the selected development plan without manual intervention.

In addition to categorical matching, lookups can incorporate scaling based on numeric Decisions, such as Lateral Length. This allows users to express inputs not as fixed values, but as functions of a development driver. For example, drilling costs can be set to scale linearly with lateral length.

This dual capability—matching for categorical variation and scaling for numeric flexibility—gives users a structured yet dynamic way to represent the economic impact of development decisions at scale.

Defining Decisions at the Project Level

Decisions are defined at the project level, meaning they are shared across your entire well inventory to ensure consistency and reusability. While Val Nav provides a set of default Decisions out of the box, these can be customized or replaced to align with your company’s naming conventions, development strategies, or asset-specific drivers.

There are two types of Decisions:

Text Decisions: Represent categorical choices (e.g., Completion Design). These must be defined as a controlled list of options—free-form text is not allowed, as strict matching is essential for automation and lookup selection.
Numeric Decisions: Represent continuous values (e.g., Lateral Length). These require a unit type to ensure proper handling of Imperial/Metric conversions.

Decisions are configured through Tools > Global Project Data > Decisions.

⚠️ Important: Decisions cannot be deleted if they are referenced anywhere in the project—whether by wells, scenarios, or economic lookups. This prevents accidental loss of critical configuration and ensures model integrity.

This centralized configuration model allows teams to align on a consistent set of development drivers while giving them the flexibility to tailor those drivers to specific evaluation needs.

Characterizing Lookups through Decisions

The core to enable this functionality is characterizing both the wells and the lookups with these decisions. First, lookups: Val Nav allows users to characterize capital and operating cost lookups with Decisions, determining how lookups are matched and scaled to each well.

Matching on Text Decisions

Text Decisions are applied at the lookup definition level, meaning the same settings apply across all decks that use the lookup. These Decisions define how a particular lookup matches:

Decisions not explicitly set on the lookup are ignored during matching.
If a lookup has no Decisions defined, it cannot be matched.
So, a match occurs only when each Decision assigned to a lookup exactly match those defined on the well, ignoring any other decisions.

Scaling from Numeric Decisions

Within each lookup, scalars can be set for individual cost entries. Allowing each cost to use a different scalar enables flexible cost modeling. For example, drilling costs may scale linearly with Lateral Length, while gathering costs remain fixed.

Today, all numeric decisions are options to apply as linear scalars. Framing scaling as a scalar optoin in lookups with linear numeric decisions scaling as an option maintains a pathway to support more sophisticated multi-variate, non-linear scaling in the future.

Configuring Lookups with Decisions

Lookup characterization can be performed:

Directly through the Val Nav UI
In bulk using the Capital and Operating Cost Deck import functionality

Modeling Wells & Groups

To implement Decision-based behavior at the well level , two components must be configured:

The Decision values must be assigned to the well
The relevant data area must be set to use the new Lookup Matching mode.

When both are set, Val Nav can automatically apply the correct lookup based on matching Decision values. Even when not matched, lookups can still be scaled based on numeric Decisions if those scalars are defined.

Inventory Tab: A Unified View

The new Inventory tab consolidates the Schedule and Decisions data areas, while preserving their independent rescat inheritance. Within this tab:

A dedicated pane displays which lookups would be matched for each data area, based on the current Decisions.
A ✔️ or ❌ icon appears next to each data area to indicate whether it is in lookup matching mode.
Since multiple lookups can be assigned to a data area, multiple lookups can be matched simultaneously.

Lookup Matching Mode

Lookup matching mode is a new, explicit input mode alongside Manual and Lookup modes. Input mode is no longer implied by the existence of data: it must be explicitly set.

Bulk Assignment Tools

Both Decision values and input modes can be updated using Val Nav’s comprehensive bulk editing tools, including the Data View, Spreadsheet Import, Input Copier, and Data Manager.

This flexibility allows users to assign and update Decisions efficiently across thousands of wells, ensuring consistent application of economic assumptions with minimal manual effort.

Reconciliation & Decisions

Decisions can play a key role in the reconciliation process, particularly when evaluating how changes in development plans impact economic results.

Option to Disconnect Lookups on Promotion

A project-level option gives you the option to realize assumptions driven by lookups on promotion into manual inputs. This can simplify Reserves review and reconciliation by breaking wells connections to lookups, preventing future changes to them from affecting reserves in the review process.

When disabled, the link to lookups is preserved throughout the reserves workflow, allowing evaluations to remain sensitive to evolving lookup assumptions.

The Decisions Step in Reconciliation

As part of the reconciliation process, Val Nav introduces a dedicated Decisions step, which covers:

Changes to Decision definitions (e.g., new options, renaming, reconfiguration)
Updates to Decision assignments on individual wells

This step does not reflect changes to the underlying lookup models themselves. Those changes are tracked within the Capital and Operating Cost reconciliation steps.

This frames the Decisions step as capturing changes to how a well is characterized, while lookup updates represent changes to the assumptions behind those characterizations.

Together, this separation provides clarity and precision when tracking the impact of both development plan changes and evolving economic assumptions.