Brad Harris, Senior Manager – Oil and Gas.
Get a warning before you’re ever out of compliance.
With the advent of fracking and horizontal drilling, onshore lease contracts are getting more and more complicated. Lease provisions are getting more granular, time-sensitive and more punitive – and all in the land owner’s favor. Lawyers who used to chase ambulances are now looking at those contracts for their next big paycheck. Are you compliant with every provision? Hundreds of millions are at stake, and our custom oil and gas software will keep scavenging lawyers away. We will warn you before you’re non-compliant and take the risk out of these complex new contracts.
Lease Provision Tracking System
With the rise of continuous drilling, minimum production, royalty escalation and other provisions that need to constantly be monitored in order to remain compliant, old ways of tracking leases in jeopardy are no longer enough to keep up. And while lawyers comb your fine print, we’ve created a way to make sure they’ll never trap you. We built an integrated lease provision tracking solution that moved a client from managing long and detailed leases manually via a disconnected spreadsheet to an integrated system with real, current information on the well in consideration’s compliance status. On top of that, we created a notification engine to inform subscribers of well status changes that affect leases before they ever come into jeopardy.
Push for Data Standardization
As a separate initiative in the royalty compliance project, Entrance software helped standardize a process to ensure well data consistency across multiple systems. Wells, and their related data, are tracked in a variety of software applications for differing purposes depending on the department and system. Land, production, operations, drilling and reservoir all use these systems for their internal purposes, but much of the same pieces of well data are used throughout. To provide a consistent well view across departments, Entrance worked with key stakeholders to identify data points that are shared and which system should serve as the “system of record” for that data point. We then wrote an automated process to keep the well data synchronized across systems, as well as warn users of any potential issues with the synchronization process on a nightly basis. The notification sign-up user interface is surfaced through a standard SharePoint portal and allows users to determine which pieces of data they want to be notified about. In addition to sharing pieces of data about wells among these various systems, Entrance also identified a well’s standard “lifecycle”, meaning the various phases a well will transition to throughout its life. These would typically span: to be drilled, drilling, awaiting completion, producing / shut-in, plugged & abandoned (with some others). Rather than rely on a user to manually transition a well through these statuses during its lifecycle, we identified triggers that will automatically move a well’s status – for example, setting a spud date would transition a well to “drilling”, while setting a sold date would transition a well to “sold”.
The Benefit of Metadata
We connected systems from all of the different departments and determined what bits of data were important to communicating well-status. Important well data now sources, pushes and pulls through our centralized database. Our client now has a consistent company-wide system of systems that keeps information on each well’s status up to date – its SPUD date, rig release date, production information, etc. With good information, not only are users in every department now up to date and on the same page, users in the corner office have a much more accurate picture of what’s going on accross departments.