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AOGCC office, library just a click away Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission makes public oil and gas data, well files available online Kristen Nelson Petroleum News Editor-in-Chief
The Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission has built an internal database over the last several years. As of Oct. 1, a portion of its public data is available online.
That means, says commission petroleum geologist Steve Davies, that a working geologist in Texas or Alberta or Scotland or Alaska has access to basic data 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without the necessity of visiting the commission in Anchorage.
A link to its public online system is available on the commission’s home page at www.aogcc.alaska.gov/, complete with online videos explaining how to use the system.
Davies, on the oil and gas data side, and commission petroleum geologist Bob Crandall, on the well history side, headed the commission’s online effort, which provides basic well and production data, and history files. Modules from other states According to Elaine Johnson, the commission’s analyst programmer, the agency’s in-house database was built on a system developed for the Ground Water Protection Council that was designed to track volumes injected. A lot of states put a lot of money into the system, adapting it to handle oil and gas production data, Davies said. The council, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and modules developed for different states, helped the commission build its own internal system based on how the Alaska agency does business.
The commission’s computerized data was moved onto the database first, combining data maintained on different systems and providing staff access to that data from their own desktops.
A big step was making the commission’s well history files available online. Crandall used a team of temporary workers to go through all of the commission’s public well files, eliminate duplicate information, arrange the files and then scan the pages. Davies said letter and legal sized pages have been scanned and are available; oversized material remains to be scanned. Making public data available Once data was available for in-house use, the next phase was “to make a product available to the public. And that just happened to coincide really nicely with the governor’s goal of increasing participation in Alaska’s oil and gas industry” by making basic data available, Davies said.
The commission has confidential data that is not public, and so the public data needed to be extracted from its database. Done on a weekly basis and sent through a firewall, “it gets put on a database server down in Juneau. And that’s a one-way gate,” Davies said. “There’s no way that anyone can go back through the firewall to get into our system.”
The Juneau computer center, a secure facility, is manned 24 hours a day, he said.
The issue with confidential data pervades the commission’s records. It receives information on completed wells which is confidential for two years before it becomes public.
The commission chose to make the transformation between confidential and non-confidential a manual step, Davies said. Rather than triggering a change from confidential to public based on a date, a person will doublecheck to make sure the data is complete and verify that it can be released. Then the data is released and is picked up in the next weekly sweep for the Juneau server.
Not only does Juneau never receive confidential data from the commission’s database, the servers used by the commission in Juneau “are owned by our agency, so no other agency can use them … Nobody else is loading data on the servers,” Johnson said.
The separate Juneau servers are “just to make sure that there could be no mistakes, because confidentiality is the basis of the agency. Trust is everything and we simply can’t lose trust,” Davies said.
Johnson said well histories aren’t even scanned until they become public. “The temporary employees who went through all the well files, none of them have ever had access to anything in our vault,” Davies said. What’s next? What has been accomplished so far, Davies said, is eliminating the “need to visit the commission for most things that people commonly request.” The agency’s online system, he said is “the electronic equivalent of a visit to the agency.”
There are large scanning projects yet to be done, such as the 75,000 well logs the commission has.
Its database also contains a lot of fields that aren’t yet populated with data, Davies said, because the agency doesn’t have the money to go back and do data input from old records. Down the road, however, perhaps three years from now, the commission could be accepting electronic data from companies, and data would fill those fields as new wells are completed.
The commission would have a secure data receiving system, Davies said, requiring companies to be registered before they could send data. Once received, data would sit on a secure upload server until it could be verified. It’s a serious security issue, Davies said, because the commission now receives information by trusted courier. With tight exploration wells, someone from the company will usually hand carry the data to the agency, and “we stamp it in and I walk it right back to the vault.”
He expects that companies may be comfortable sending sidetracks of development wells electronically, but they may still “choose to hand carry” information from tight exploration wells.
An electronic receiving system “will be as secure as we can make it, but if you’re still concerned … you can hand carry,” he said.
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