In 1995 PI & Dwights EnergyData merged. Part of regulatory approval for the merge was that a copy of the Dwights data be licensed to a new competing company. Federal Trade Commission received applications from 6 qualifying companies, and in November 1998, awarded Pennwell the dataset which was transferred in December 1998.

Pennwell was founded in 1910 by P.C. Boyles, an oil scout for John D. Rockerfeller in Pennsylvania. Pennwell now has 90 years of publishing with a stable of 50 magazines and journals including the prestigious Oil and Gas Journal. Pennwell also maintains many industry maps databases. PennPoint is a new Houston-based service which will develop the Dwights dataset by capturing more data from original sources such as state and federal regulatory agencies through a network of data gatherers. Reporters (rather than "Scouts") will augment this information by gathering non-regulatory data from operators and service companies.

PennPoint is working on what is claimed to be a state-of-the-art database. This was made possible because PennPoint had no legacy database or systems. The new PennPoint database has been built on the PPDM data model and will include well and production data from the Dwights database together with specialized project-oriented datasets such as basins, trends, completion types and regional studies integrating geology and engineering data.

Custom data retrieval and other services will be part of the new offering as will statistical services and mapping.

Initially the 22 most active US areas will be covered, with these to be extended as market conditions dictate. All state source documents will be scanned and made available. PennPoint is currently discussing a 'revolutionary' new data delivery mechanism with operators.

PennPoint promises timely data and daily updates over the web and complete, integrated datasets that include production, land and well data

Cooperation is being sought with the major application vendors, Geographix, Landmark, and GeoQuest for enhanced interoperability.

A pricing policy will favorize low volume data purchases.

Other cooperative efforts are underway with Petroleum Exchange Denver (www.petroweb.com) and International Datashare (IDS) of Calgary. N Pennpoint is also working on an Autodesk map based CD-ROM product which will be a bundle of well history and scout tickets production data, land grid coordinates. Included in the bundle is GeoDesk, browsing software from IDS. Data from either the CD-ROM or obtained by credit card purchase from the PennPoint website will be downloadable directly into a GeoGraphix project or a text file. Check out PennPoint on www.pennpoint.com.