Speaking at the at the PESGB/GeolSoc conference on ‘preserving geological assets’ earlier this year, PPDM association CEO Trudy Curtis surprised at least one person in the audience with her keynote address on ‘the value of regulatory data standards.’ Regulatory agencies need to deal with many operating companies and ideally there should be ‘global standards for vocabulary, data and formats.’ PPDM has been working with the Alberta Energy Regulator to investigate such issues with a questionnaire issued to stakeholders including North American operators and other users of regulatory datasets along with regulators in Australia, Canada, Mexico, Spain and the US. The survey set out to identify ‘pain points’ such as cumbersome regulations which may divert capital to other jurisdictions. Regulators and reporting companies are having a hard time keeping up with the evolution of explorations technology, especially with unconventionals.
PPDM has kicked-off a regulatory work group to address such issues, to find consensus and develop a regulatory vocabulary to serve as a ‘Rosetta stone’ to disambiguate key terms and phrases such as well, log and completion. The work group is also to investigate the extension of the PPDM data model to better address the regulatory environment. Data exchange formats are considered out of scope for this project.
Comment: This is a laudable effort but Curtis’ apparent failure to refer to the work of Energistics in the regulatory field, and the National data repository work group is puzzling. The next meet of the NDR is scheduled for June 6-8th, 2017 in Stavanger, Norway.
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.