The managers of a public corporation have a fiduciary responsibility to maximise the value of its assets, as determined by their price in the financial markets of relevance to its investors. There are a wide variety of approaches that attempt to determine which management alternative in any given commercial situation will maximise asset value. Practice in the upstream petroleum industry reflects this diversity and has evolved over time, as organisations have sought processes not only to make better choices from among alternatives for the design and management of real assets, but also to generate a better range of alternatives to consider. An important part of many of these approaches is the estimation of asset value using discounted cash-flow (DCF) methods. There has also been exploration of some other approaches to estimating asset value, some of which are known in the industry as "real options analysis" (ROA) methods.
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