October 2009

We have just completed a busy couple of months of travel to attend various industry events and user group meetings:

Oklahoma

The first Oklahoma PPDM User Group meeting was held in late June. We had over 100 individuals registered for the event representing 20 different companies. Chesapeake hosted the meeting in their outstanding facilities; attendees requested that this become an annual event.

Calgary

In June, Trudy spoke at the annual C3Geo Convention in Calgary about challenges with integrating wells in master data stores.
A ‘What is a Well’ sponsor workgroup meeting was held in late July with attendees participating via Halo from BP and Nexen facilities. The quality of the video connection enabled ‘normal’ conversation and a great deal of progress was made.

Australia

The annual Australian PPDM Data Management Conference was held in downtown Perth once again. We had strong representation from the operator, vendor and government communities with over 60 individuals attending the two day event. The combination of presentations, workshops and panel discussions focused on master data management, new technology and ongoing data management challenges. The event was well received. We thank our sponsors, geoLOGIC, Petrosys, Fugro Data Solutions, and CGGVeritas for helping us to make it a success and for keeping registration costs minimal
Following the Perth Data Management Conference, Steve hosted a meeting with 12 representatives from government and the oil and gas industry to discuss well definition and naming standards. Valuable discussions were held and a number of action items agreed upon to support the Australian ‘What is a Well?’ initiative.
Meanwhile, Trudy traveled to Canberra to host a Geochemistry workgroup meeting. The geochemistry model draft is largely complete; details are being finalized over the next few months. More workgroup meetings are planned for Calgary and Houston. If you are interested in participating, please contact us at info@ppdm.org.

Europe

After returning from Perth, Trudy jumped on a plane to Norway to speak the annual ECIM conference and the ESRI European Petroleum Users Group meeting. The ECIM Conference is the largest data management conference in the world, with over 300 delegates; the E-PUG is a growing event that attracts over 100 delegates. Trudy spoke about integrating wells from multiple systems at the ECIM Conference, and about options for making the PPDM Data Model spatial at the E-PUG conference.

Membership Renewal

Membership renewal letters went out at the beginning of the summer. If you have not yet completed your renewal we would respectfully ask you to follow up on this as soon as possible as it helps us plan our activities for the upcoming year.

We look forward to catching up with many of our membership at the Calgary Work Group meetings, Fall Conference and AGM in October.

New Members

We would like to welcome the following new members to the PPDM Association:

Accenture
FUSE Information Management
SAS Institute Inc.
Doug Wetherill
David Young
Michael T. Dominick
Andrew Zolnai
Brad Taggart

Whats New at PPDM?

Membership Categories
The PPDM Association is pleased to announce two new categories of membership:

Individual – for E&P data management professionals at a nominal fee
Student – for current students at no charge

For more information, please follow the link to the membership page.

Upcoming PPDM Events

You can review details and register for all of these events through the PPDM web site.

Calgary Data Management Conference, AGM
and Work Group Meetings: October 26th - 28th
The Fall Conference and AGM will take place in Calgary in late October. The agenda has now been finalized for the event and we have an exceptional line up of presentations and Work Groups. If you have not registered, we encourage you take advantage of the early-registration discount on the registration page.

There are three Work Group meetings planned for Oct. 26th including ‘What is a Well’, 'Geochemistry', and 'Business Rules and Data Quality’.

Board of Directors

The Board of Directors invites voting members to submit candidates for election to the 2009/2010 board. If you would like to discuss participation, please contact us at info@ppdm.org or contact any of the current board members.

We are grateful to geoLOGIC for being a platinum sponsor of this event and to all of our sponsors:

Platinum Event Series Sponsor

Gold Sponsor

Bronze Sponsor

For the latest details on PPDM Association, please go the PPDM web site.

Work Group Updates

What is a Well?
Phase II of the ‘What is a Well?’ initiative is progressing well. Industry experts, working with PPDM resources have identified key facets for well status and classification and are working to create facet value lists. We are also gathering a significant number of map symbol sets and using these to establish a baseline. For more information, and to see the results of the Phase 1 project, visit What Is A Well.

Meetings were held in Australia to review the work completed so far to perform a comparison of the regulatory data against the well component baseline definitions. We have a commitment from the regulatory agencies to continue to supporting this work.

Business Rules
The sponsorship drive for the Business Rules Work Group is proceeding. Noah Consulting and Chevron have joined the group. This group intends to develop standardized business rules for the oil and gas industry. For more information, please visit Business Rules Workgroup

Geochemistry
The Geochemistry model draft has been integrated with the PPDM data model and is being reviewed by Work Group experts in Australia, the US, the UK and Canada. Four key subject areas have been identified by this workgroup:

Sample collection and sample management
Sample preparation and manipulation
Sample analysis studies and results (outcomes)
Quality control and data validation

For more information or to review working documents, visit Geochemistry Workgroup

PPDM Implementation Case Study

Land HO

To any O&G company, land is the foundation to exploration. Whether in the Arctic tundra or the Sahara desert, acquiring mineral rights through auction or contract ensures the legal right of ownership to any petroleum discovery.

Keeping track of large land holdings can be a daunting task, however. Not only are they dispersed geographically under a myriad of regulatory regimes, but optimizing their value requires a host of analytical tools to keep track of rights, obligations and current and future value.

In addition, knowing which rights are held by other companies and which rights are available for acquisition is critical in ensuring that a company is optimizing their development and exploration plans.

For the last quarter century, geoLOGIC has been developing geoscience data and software for the petroleum sector. Over 8,000 customers use its geoSCOUT suite to access and analyze public and proprietary data on wells, land, pipelines and seismic.
Central to the Calgary-based company’s popularity is its geoLOGIC Data Center (gDC), an online petroleum information system that offers rapid access to a wide range of high quality data, including well, facilities and land information.

Traditionally, land and lease information has been available through a number of vendors, usually in their own proprietary formats. This all changed with PPDM version 3.7. “gDC is based on PPDM 3.7,” says Sean Udell, vice president of technology. “An open data model like PPDM allows any software to interact with any data set in the system, and gives the user full interoperability by employing a uniform set of standards.”

PPDM has been around for many years, but implementations of the model were often incomplete as both software and data vendors would pick and choose which parts of the model to use. This was particularly true of those vendors who worked with historic land and lease data where applications had to use this data specifically “tuned” to a vendor’s proprietary data model since there was no suitable PPDM implementation.

With the release of PPDM 3.7, geoLOGIC identified a market opportunity for a fully compliant, standard PPDM implementation including land. This was a massive undertaking including over 640 million rows of data in over 500 tables. Of this amount, over 360 million rows were devoted to Land. To date, geoLOGIC has invested almost 30 person years and over $2 million in creating this system. “The real strength of the model developed by the PPDM organization is that it fully supports the operation of businesses on all sides of the industry,” says Udell. “The Land model can be applied equally by data providers, application providers, and E&P companies. In practical terms, it means that applications can be written once for the model, rather than having to be tuned for each vendor’s database implementation.”

The concept has proven to be very popular. “We have had over forty established application vendors working with this data,” says Udell. Application providers have found that, even with applications that they have spent over 10 years fine-tuning as a proprietary model, they have been able to recreate that work in less than a year. “Our customers now have a completely open source of well and land information that can be accessed by their tool of choice.”

The new, open-standard system is now available to the entire industry. “We have always believed that engineering, land, geology and management professionals should be able to access the data they want, using the software tools they choose," says David Hood, president of geoLOGIC. “Until we remove the business barriers placed in the way of our customers in accessing data, we cannot have a truly open system - no matter how much progress we make on the technical front. PPDM is a critical part of our business.”