Minerals Report - International Seabed Authority

possibility to evaluate the results of each well and correlate these results with
others. This provides an optimal basis for the authorities’ regional
understanding of the petroleum potential in order to prepare for new
licensing rounds. By releasing data after two years, the oil companies are also
able to carry out evaluations of the resource potential within an area.
5. The Norwegian National Data Set – DISKOS
The most important tool for offshore exploration is seismic data.
Acquisition of seismic data in the North Sea started in 1962. Since then about
4.3 million line kilometres of seismic data have been acquired on the
Norwegian continental shelf. Through the years, petroleum activity has
generated increasingly higher amounts of data due to the numbers of wells,
and to new technology. There has been an explosive development in the use
of 3D seismic, which is now the sole method used for mapping discoveries
and fields and is dominant in an exploration context. Nearly 1000 exploration
wells and more than 2000 production wells have been drilled. Experience
show that the petroleum industry has a great challenge in managing it’s own
data; a typical development project produces up to 30,000 drawings, 300,000
documents and uses more than 1.5 million sheets of paper!
Modern exploration techniques generate huge quantities of
information, but the logistics of traditional data storage are often inefficient
and costly. People involved thus spend too much time searching for data and
collecting data of often-uncertain quality. This was the main concern when
NPD took an initiative to establish a common national data repository for
exploration and production related data called DISKOS. By means of this
repository, data may be transferred directly to workstations at high speed and
low costs, and data may be traded by easily changing owner rights to data in
the data store. This is also a practical way to make data public after the
required confidentiality period.
The software solution for the DISKOS data repository, called
PetroBank, has been designed to provide users with rapid access to all data to
which they hold a legal right of access. The company that pays for its initial
acquisition owns the data. The NPD has access to all data by law, but
INTERNATIONAL SEABED AUTHORITY 798