E-commerce push from MMS

PDM visited with the US Mineral Management Services - the government body responsible for awarding petroleum licenses and monitoring activity. Suzan Bacigalupi heads up Information Management with the MMS’ New Orleans branch which handles the offshore Gulf of Mexico Region. Suzan gave PDM a status report on e-commerce activity in the MMS with special reference to the POSC pilot project.

Bacigalupi – The push comes from government. By 2003 an e-commerce option will be mandatory. We already provide a lot of information on the public domain website www.mms.gov and we are currently working on improving the store front look. Ultimately, we will have MMS business objects on the web allowing for electronic posting of applications to drill, sundry notice and directional surveys.

Bacigalupi - The POSC pilot project was a test-bed for electronic data transfer between oil and gas companies and the MMS. We want to receive data electronically, but there will also be a lot on offer for oil and gas companies. We expect to provide look-up tables for object names, error checking and automated QC for data entry. Business rules will check for valid well APIs etc.

Bacigalupi - We used XML forms (see the code sample) to simplify data entry and provide real time QC of incoming data. Right now we are looking to augment the XML data entry with an Oracle database.

Bacigalupi - We had some issues with security and hardware which are currently being fixed. We have a good record of corporate entitlements, but have noted a problem with authentication. This gets hard at the individual level - who has authority to act for a given oil company?

Bacigalupi The current public meeting system of lease sales is written down in the legislation which would have to be changed to allow electronic lease sale. There are no plans to do this at present. We have introduced an electronic fund transfer mechanism in place for receiving the bid monies.

PDM - Where is the project now?

Bacigalupi - The pilot was a success and we are now in the planning stage of the full scale project. We will start simply with a few forms and are working on security, hardware, firewalls entitlement management authentication. �