Digital Energy Journal- OGA – public dashboards of production data

Join | Existing Member Login

You are Home » News » View Article

OGA – public dashboards of production data

Monday, June 20, 2022

The UK's Oil and Gas Authority is providing public dashboards of daily production data. Robert Swiergon, OGA's technical data manager, explained how it works

Under the UK's 2016 Energy Act, operators have to report daily production data for the life of the field, said Robert Swiergon, technical data manager with the UK's Oil and Gas Authority (OGA), speaking at a SPDM forum in November.

OGA has the right to make this publicly available, and it is keen to make daily production data public as much as it can, he said.

Fields which ceased production before January 1, 2018, fall under earlier legislation, the Petroleum Act, where OGA is only able to disclose production data with the consent of the operator.

This only counts where the OGA has approved the cessation of production, and production has in fact finished - sometimes operators state intent to cease production but then continue.

For fields still in production, OGA has been issuing 'Section 34 Notices' which specify the accepted data types, which attributes are required, and time scales for reporting. OGA also provides a Microsoft Excel template and user guide.

'I have examples of operators which had difficulty getting the required data out of their systems in the required manner,' he said. 'We still encounter field operators who are unaware of their commitments.'

If the data requires manipulation, that increases the chances of error, such as the same production being submitted twice, he said.

OGA has seen data inconsistencies, such as different operators involved in a joint venture using different names for the same wellbore, or inconsistent reporting periods.

Some companies have supplied low quality data, sometimes covering specific periods of time, or there are periods where no data was reported at all. There have been fields where the number of hours of production reported is negative.

One challenge is satellite wellbores, tied back to a main wellbore, where sometimes there is very little data. Or fields with multiple sidetracks. There might be wells which have stopped, restarted, or converted to injection wells.

'The majority of these issues we can overcome but some we cannot,' he said.

The data is shared in two ways - as raw data which can be used directly by data analysts, or via an online 'Power BI' dashboard interface.

The dashboard is refreshed every Monday morning. 'My hope is that we can work with the system to automatically refresh as soon as a new submission has been validated,' he said.

Currently data from 58 fields is in the dashboard - but there should be data from around 80 fields available, he said. If data is not provided in the right format, it cannot be added to the dashboard.

OGA hopes to be able to add additional data, such as data about CO2 injection. Currently there is just production data. It also plans to add new graphs to the dashboard.

OGA is planning a portal for uploading data, with automatic quality control tools, which enable operators to quickly identify and correct inaccuracies.

The data is being used by 'lots of academics', and also companies interested in acquiring fields which have reported COP, he said. 'We've had a few companies come to us with specific data requests. The data is there for anybody to get their hands on.'

Associated Companies
» Oil and Gas Authority (OGA)

comments powered by Disqus

CREATE A FREE MEMBERSHIP

To attend our free events, receive our newsletter, and receive the free colour Digital Energy Journal.