Mostafa Mohammadi

Kort om meg

I am a PhD candidate and Research Fellow in Energy Engineering and Geoscience at the University of Stavanger. My research focuses on improving the quality of probabilistic forecasts used in petroleum exploration, with particular emphasis on forecast verification, calibration, uncertainty assessment, and decision support.

Before starting my PhD, I worked as a petroleum, process, and production engineer, supporting field operations, production optimization, reservoir-to-surface studies, process modelling, and engineering workflows. This industry background gives me a practical perspective on how uncertainty, forecasts, and technical evaluations influence real engineering and investment decisions.

My current work combines geoscience, engineering, statistics, machine learning, and decision analysis to develop more reliable and transparent methods for evaluating and improving exploration forecasts.

Dette forsker jeg på

My research investigates how probabilistic forecasts in petroleum exploration perform and how they can be improved. I study pre-drilling forecasts such as probability of discovery and hydrocarbon volume estimates and compare them with actual post-drilling outcomes.

I am particularly interested in:

• verification and calibration of probabilistic forecasts
• forecast bias, optimism, overconfidence, and miscalibration
• uncertainty quantification and decision analysis
• geological probability of success and volume forecasts
• reference class forecasting and statistical calibration methods
• machine learning approaches for improving engineering and geoscience workflows
• decision-support tools for exploration economics and risk-based decisions

The main goal of my research is to support better decisions under uncertainty by making exploration forecasts more reliable, transparent, and useful for decision-making.

Akademisk bakgrunn

I am currently a PhD candidate at the University of Stavanger, where my research topic is Debiasing of Probabilistic Forecasts. My work develops statistical and data-driven workflows for evaluating forecast performance, identifying bias, and improving the calibration of uncertainty estimates used in exploration decisions.

I hold an MSc in Petroleum Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology, where my thesis focused on Production Optimization Under Market and Geological Uncertainty. My academic and professional background includes petroleum engineering, reservoir simulation, production optimization, uncertainty quantification, decision analysis, and data-driven modelling.

I have also published research on probability forecast verification in petroleum exploration and robust optimization of oil production under uncertainty.