Optimization of Upstream Oil and Gas Contracts: A Principal-Agent Model

The history of oil contracts in the last century indicates that oil contracts are a form of conflict between the interests of foreign oil companies and national interests of reservoir-owning governments. In this context, an important question arises for reservoir-owning governments as to which existing conventional upstream contracts should be chosen to maximize benefits. Representation theory has been used to answer this research question. In the designed model, each party's interest function in each of the upstream contracts is identified and modeled. Also, the rationality and motivation conditions in this model have been analyzed as participation constraints. The results of the proposed model using the genetic algorithm method show that, given field coordinates, the production-sharing contract has the lowest representation cost compared to the other two contracts of concession and service purchase. And as the selected model, production-sharing contracts can make the most profit for reservoir-owning governments.