In the North Sea, data really is the new oil

And it supports ‘weird and wonderful’ projects, says NSTA CIO

Instead of a "mad” secretive approach, the UK’s oil and gas companies now share terabytes of open data with each other thanks to regulator the NSTA.

Oil and gas operators rely on high-quality information to find and tap new reservoirs of hydrocarbons, but even giants like Shell and BP find gathering that data expensive.

One of the North Sea Transition Authority’s (NSTA) major goals is to make the region’s oil recovery more economically efficient. For CIO John Seabourn, that meant a fresh approach to data.

"You had this situation in the oil and gas industry where it was quite secretive. People would go and spend millions of pounds acquiring data and then it would sit on a shelf. They'd use it for their purpose and forget about it, and then another company would come in, and they'd spend millions of pounds...collecting data.

“From a UK plc perspective, that's just madness. You're just spending more and more money shooting and collecting all of this data, when actually as UK plc, we'd much rather you...be doing those value-add activities than spending huge amounts of money on data capture that somebody's already done.”

With the energy transition in full swing, those value-adds aren’t just new ways to find oil. They include infrastructure investment, carbon storage and finding new sites for wind farms.

The NSTA’s Digital Energy Platform (DEP) lies at the heart of the data transformation. It’s a wide-ranging term for everything in the organisation’s digital estate, but John breaks it down into three main areas.

First is the Energy Portal of about 20 industry-facing government-to-business transactional applications, underpinned by multiple databases. Operators can use this to “apply for consents and permits, apply for licensing, make changes to their licensing, apply to drill wells, apply for consent to flare, and many, many other things.”

The Portal dates back almost 25 years, before NSTA was broken out as a government company in 2016; but the regulator has worked with a sister body, the Offshore Petroleum Regulator for Environment and Decommissioning (Opred) to modernise it over time, so it “feels a bit more like gov.uk.”

“There’s an app for that”

NSTA collects “a lot of information and data” through the Energy Portal, but the data needs context to create value. That’s where the DEP’s second pillar comes in: NSTA's in-house platforms, which include a data warehouse, geospatial intelligence and business intelligence.

The "front window” to those platforms is the open data portal website, running on “Microsoft Azure, with Esri technology and with Power BI, and we also have a little bit of SAP Business Objects running in there.”

John says the platforms’ primary purpose is “to help us make better business decisions with all the data that we collect, and support anyone within NSTA to just do things better.”

Building on open data has been one of John’s key ambitions since he joined NSTA in 2014. It means the regulator can push “more and more stuff” into APIs, and build interactive maps, dashboards and outputs.

"We know we've got people in the industry who are interested in knowing what infrastructure is on a particular license. There's an app for that. Each one's designed to answer a very specific question... We’ve tried to be really user-centric and user-focused.”

Carrot and stick

The open data ambition wouldn’t be complete without the third and final part: the National Data Repository, which does for industry data what the in-house platforms do for the NSTA’s. It’s the answer to the “mad” data secrecy mentioned at the top of this article, but getting oil giants to play nice was no easy task.

Expecting competing private companies to help each other “was never going to happen,” so NSTA opted for the carrot-and-stick approach.

The carrot was easy: everyone agreed data sharing was a good idea. The Energy Act 2016, which forced them all to share data at the same time (so nobody got an advantage), was the stick.

To oversee data sharing, NSTA established a new role every oil and gas company operating in the UK has to fill – no arguments. That Information and Samples Coordinator is responsible for sending data to NSTA. If they don’t, John is empowered to contact the CEO and escalate from there.

“It's the only role that you need to have to run an oil and gas company in the UK, legally,” he says.

Creating the Coordinator role is one of John's favourite things he has done since joining NSTA, because “it adds value to IT and data professionals,” who were previously “always” the first people to be let go in a downturn.

“You had this constant cycle of all of them disappearing, and then them staffing back up, almost starting again, being made redundant again, and then coming back in.

“So, one thing that we did is to say, well, this is now an important role: you need to have it, and you need to fund it.”

NSTA took over the system the data repository would be built on in 2019, when it was run by industry stakeholders. Two years later, the regulator switched to a much smaller company with “incredible” compression technology, which enabled a move to the cloud.

Since then, the NDR has grown from 15 terabytes to just over one petabyte, and it’s provisioned for five times that size.

Companies and academics use the data NSTA makes available every day – whether it’s to site new wind farms or write a postdoc about new ways to store hydrogen.

“Some of these projects are weird and wonderful and incredible... [The NDR] is really kind of enabling that innovation and different thinking of what the subsurface could be used for.”