State taps into online market to promote North Slope lease sales

In an effort to reach oil and gas companies worldwide, the Division of Oil and Gas is advertising upcoming sales on IndigoPool.com

By Kay Cashman

PNA Publisher

Jim Hansen, the man in charge of the state’s oil and gas lease sales, is testing online advertising to reach companies not on the Division of Oil and Gas’s mailing list.

The division has signed a deal with IndigoPool.com, a Schlumberger company based in Houston, to advertise the state’s Oct. 24 North Slope and Beaufort Sea areawide lease sales.

“We are still doing mail-outs and everything else we usually do to advertise a sale. This is something added to reach more people in the industry companies around the world that are not on our mailing list,” Hansen told PNA July 23.

“We’ll put it on our web site and some can look at it but IndigoPool is sending our message out to industry. … They are proactive in their marketing,” he said.

IndigoPool has 673 companies in more than 100 countries registered as users who pay an annual fee per business unit to review oil and gas properties on its web site.

The company also sends periodic electronic mailings about available oil and gas properties and lease sales to a targeted list of oil and gas professionals from around the world.

IndigoPool executive Vivek Chandra told PNA July 23 that the emails contain a link to the company’s web site where executive summaries are available on the various lease sales and properties.

“You have to be a subscriber, a registered user, to see a lot of details,” he said. “The most sensitive data is behind the wall.”

But because the state’s seismic and other technical data is “public domain,” Chandra said most of its information will available to all viewers.

Named by Forbes magazine last summer as one of the leading B2B web sites for the energy industry, Indigo Pool.com offers a live online data room. Interested parties can obtain all of the detailed asset information available in a physical data room, such as reserves land records, field data, maps, engineering, geologic studies and well files.

Chandra said that the firm’s technology allows users to browse and select large data sets quickly in a controlled, secure environment. Information can be searched by data type or within a specific area using interactive GIS maps. An interactive log viewer allows users to view and manipulate log data.

Alaska, Hansen said, is IndigoPool’s first US state customer.

“We have represented ten national governments around the world to promote their oil and gas lease rounds. Since going on-line in April 2000, our company has advertised oil and gas properties and lease sales with a cumulative value exceeding $5 billion,” Chandra said.

Why has IndigoPool.com survived and, according to Chandra, thrived?

“Most of our success is because of our neutrality,” he said. “Also, because we are a global web site with global usage. And our technology and security is far superior to anyone else. We have a large number of professional developers with industry experience working on developing and improving software. We are continuously increasing the functionality of the site since our initial release in April 2000.”

Hansen said the state did a test run with IndigoPool.com this past spring when it advertised for competitive bids for the Nenana basin exploration license proposal.

“We were on their site for a month. We didn’t receive any other competing bids but we did generate some interest from the site,” Hansen said.

The state had not expected any competing bids from that advertisement because of the Interior basin’s inaccessibility to infrastructure, but Hansen was “encouraged” by the nibbles he did get, some of which came from oil companies that had left the state.

Hanson expects to post advertisements for the sale in late July and advertise for three months prior to the Oct. 24 North Slope and Beaufort Sea areawide lease sales.

“We’re going to give them anything that might attract someone who is not familiar with the North Slope,” Hansen said.

The two October sales are a test, he said, to see how the online service works for the state.

“I can monitor who is actually going into our page on their web site. From there they can go into our web site, so I get feedback to see if this is really drawing interest from companies we’ve not been able to reach in the past.”