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Events
26th February 2013
Standards Leadership Council
Forum
London, England
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Welcome to the new
Energistics Regulators Newsletter. It is a direct result of the very
successful NDR11 meeting in Kuala Lumpur. I am very pleased that NDR
meetings are a venue where Regulators can do business with each other
and I hope to welcome many more of you as members of Energistics.
It is our intention that these Newsletters will be issued regularly
in advance of the next NDR meeting. Stewart
Robinson is helping us
produce these newsletters so if you have any comments, want to help
or contribute please contact him directly.
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Jerry
Hubbard
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This newsletter is for Regulators. Initially it will
centre on following up issues, actions and suggestions that came from
NDR11 in Kuala Lumpur but it can and will be used for other items. If
you want to advertise what you are doing, announce that your NDR has
gone live or you are thinking of re-tendering let me know and I'll
put it in. We can expand away from NDR activities to other regulatory
activities but the intention of this newsletter is for it to be for
the workers, i.e. the people who do the work, who do the data
management.
In this first issue I have introduced Energistics and
other standards type organisations. Although Energistics
is funded by major oil, service and software
suppliers, the Energistics board recognise that Regulators are potentially
real beneficiaries from standards. That is why they have supported
the NDR efforts. The NDR meetings would not go ahead without
Energistics but few of the attendees are members. The Board wants to
feel some commitment from Regulators, effectively by more of them
becoming members. I will be contacting all of you who are not members
in the near future. The membership fees will be pitched very low to
try and encourage wide involvement.
In this first issue I have included a report on NDR11,
the follow up actions and what is happening with the Production
Reporting work. Next time I will highlight one NDR, I will ask them
first.
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Stewart
Robinson, Energistics
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Energistics is the global, not-for-profit, membership
organization that serves as the facilitator, custodian and advocate
for the development and adoption of technical open data exchange
standards in the upstream oil and gas industry. Uniquely designed to
unite upstream industry professionals in a neutral and collaborative
facilitation environment, Energistics membership consists of
integrated, independent and national oil companies, oilfield service
companies, software vendors, system integrators, regulatory agencies
and the global standards user community.
In
my words they are the people who are developing the digital data
exchange standards that Regulators and NDRs need. They have three flagship
standards WITSML (for drilling data), PRODML (for production
data) and RESQML (for reservoir data). These standards contain almost
all any Regulator would want.
  
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Standards Leadership Council
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Together with
Energistics there are a number of other organisations developing
standards that are useful to Regulators, often in niche parts of the
business, some of these are: Mimosa, PIDX International, POSC Caesar,
PPDM, OGC, OPC, PODS.
Earlier
this year the executive leaders from each of these organisations met
with Energistics to form the Standards Leadership Council (SLC).
The nine members of the SLC are Energistics (Jerry Hubbard), MIMOSA
(Alan Johnston), Open Geospatial Consortium (Carl Reed), OPC
Foundation (Tom Burke), PIDX International (Tony Aming), PODS (Janet
Sinclair), POSC Caesar Association (Nils Sandsmark), PPDM Association
(Trudy Curtis), and Society of Exploration Geophysicists (Jill
Lewis).
I will keep you up to date with the actions from these meetings. At
the first meeting they all agreed that collaboration was essential,
that they need to tell each other what they are doing and importantly
do not work on the same thing producing competing solutions.
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Managing the growing volume of oil and gas data is a
major problem for all governments. That is why we started the NDR
meetings many years ago. The 11th meeting of Government
Regulators responsible for the
management of this data was hosted recently by Petronas in Kuala
Lumpur. 180 delegates from 25 different countries gathered for three
intensive days of work taking forward issues from previous meetings,
bringing each other up to date with what is happening in their
countries and, in particular, identifying areas where they could
collaborate.
A full report of the proceedings will be published on
the NDR11 website and also on the Energistics website. A full list of delegates is included but
without their email addresses. (If anyone wants individual ones
please contact me.)
Country reports continue to be interesting and a
valuable source of information for delegates. The experiment to have
a detailed template and a short country report seems to have been
well received. There have been more comments on how we deliver
country feedbacks at these meetings and how we further improve this
part of the meeting will be a topic for the new committee. The
proceedings contain a summary of the country reports but there were a
few common themes.
- There
are many common issues that arise that need to be addressed in
the planning stages to improve the deployment of any new NDR.
These issues are in the areas of : Administrative procedures,
Staffing and Data.
- Countries
are rightly proud of what they have achieved. The deployment of
an NDR is a major achievement in itself but the following
success areas were also mentioned: Introduction and development
of Standards, Links to portals an improving Legislation.
- There
are still problems, with the two most common being Data quality
and Standards.
A major objective of these meetings is to learn
lessons from each other and to establish collaboration between
governments on non-competitive issues such as data quality and data
exchange standards. As a consequence we run breakout sessions to
address issues and problems. All the breakout sessions run were well
received, some more than others and very detailed reports on the
sessions are included in the proceedings. A significant time was
spent in planning these sessions. We can do better and we will take
account of the comments made in the feedback.
A theme that emerged from this year's conference is
that while NDR's are fast becoming a vital aspect of an exploration
project, there is a wide variety of regulatory expectations and
equally, of requirements by operators. There is need for a directory
of regulatory requirements to assist both regulators and operators.
Energistics has agreed to consider supporting an index of all NDRs,
including as much information that will be useful, on their website.
They will maintain a Total Index of all Regulatory Bodies and against
this index the following information:
- Template
and reports from NDR11 and before.
- A list
of standards and guidelines that they use and publish, url
links.
- Main
website addresses.
This will all be public. In parallel I will maintain
lists of contacts in specific jobs such as Head of Exploration, main
NDR contact etc. This list will be kept secure and not made
public.
The meeting was not all work and included a visit to
the impressive, newly opened Petronas Core Store and a trip up the
iconic Petronas Tower. Overall a very enjoyable and useful meeting.
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NDR11 included a report back from the Production
Reporting Work Group, which was formed at NDR10. They presented a
proof of concept daily production report developed from requirements
gathered from six countries and based on the Energistics production
standard, PRODML.
Using PRODML, the two teams working independently were able to
demonstrate how production data can be moved digitally and seamlessly
from an operator direct to a National Data Repository without manual
intervention. The data specification has now been verified by twelve
countries and two operators. I will be circulating this widely,
probably in early 2013, and then work will start to produce an XML
standard for this data. 
This is a very positive outcome from NDR meetings and
it is hoped that similar efforts will arise from NDR11.
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One of the aims of NDR11 was to perpetuate
collaboration and, as a result, a number of work groups will be set
up as a follow-up to the breakout sessions. These work groups will
be:
- Policies
and best practices for managing seismic field data
- Policies
and best practices for managing cores and samples
- Guidelines
for managing data ownership and IPR in an NDR environment
- Data
quality and data validation
- Training
an recruiting data management staff for an NDR
- Commercial
and business models for an NDR
- NDR
tendering and re-tendering options for an NDR - produce a
cookbook
There are volunteers to run these collaborations. The
collaboration facilities provided by Energistics will be used and
they will be kicked off in early 2013. If you want to take part in
any of the collaborations please contact Jerry
Hubbard at Energistics.
We are looking to organise the next meeting which we
are calling NDR2014. There is a new chairperson, a committee and a
possible venue at Baku in Azerbaijan. More news to follow.
Lastly, we will try to improve the communication and
collaboration between Regulators between meetings. This Newsletter is
a part of that, improving the Energistics website and setting up an index of Regulators is another and,
importantly, encouraging more people to join in is vital.
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Energistics is a global, not-for-profit, membership
organization that serves as the facilitator, custodian and advocate for
the development and adoption of technical open data exchange standards in
the upstream oil and gas industry.
Energistics is uniquely designed to unite upstream industry professionals
in a neutral and collaborative facilitation environment. Energistics
membership consists of integrated, independent and national oil
companies, oilfield service companies, hardware and software vendors, system
integrators, regulatory agencies and the global standards user community.
Questions? Comments?
Contact Melissa Ray.
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