Guy Holmes, founder of Perth company DataReSource, which just hired former Geoscience Australia geoscientist Andrew McMahon to a newly-created role to boost its search-and-find capacity, said that NOPTA's new system was a "massive and positively received" improvement.

 

However, he also said the new system, developed by Geoscience Australia and NOPTA, would likely never comprehensively address past indiscretions by operators who failed to submit data or where data was lost in the various transitions between regulatory bodies.

 

GA developed the National Offshore Petroleum Information Management System (NOPIMS) as an online data discovery and delivery system for all Australian offshore petroleum wells and seismic surveys.

 

NOPTA recently moved to a new system to offer more functionality to users, with no registration required to access seismic and well related information acquired in Commonwealth waters. 

 

GA says the system is compatible with all major browsers and includes an intuitive interface, predictive search boxes and HTML5 Map which means that the map can be accessed on all platforms, including tablets and mobiles.

 

NOPIMS has been populated with header information for more than 3517 wells and 1987 surveys and will be progressively updated as new activities occur. 

 

The system holds all digital open file data for wells, a selection of reports and open file digital data for survey activities, including reprocessed ones.

 

Over the next few months, paper documents, legacy data submitted on 7 and 9.5 track reels, field data and large SEGY datasets as well as information on petroleum mining samples held at GA will be migrated to the NOPIMS 2017 platform.

 

 

"They've made some big improvements in that area, but addressing historical issues with data that has never been submitted or was lost is complex, and likely not a key focus for NOPTA or GA at this stage," Holmes told Energy News.

 

"In 1946 the Bureau of Mineral Resources was formed which was the first real significant government oversight body for the exploration industry.  The BMR also did its own exploration activities on behalf of the Commonwealth. The BMR became AGSO in 1992, and then AGSO became GA in 2001.  

 

"During these transitions, the focus of the government moved from the whole of the Commonwealth to just offshore areas, leaving states to fend for themselves.  

 

"Over time the states also went through many changes, and with each change a new opportunity for data to be lost or forgotten was introduced.   

 

"Depending on which state, on or offshore, and whether you were looking for minerals or oil and gas, you had a different government body that was interested in you. To further complicate this, these state agencies then also continued to morph by changing name, administrators and guidelines."  

 

He said the question of how data should be captured, managed and deposited with the governing bodies was different depending on the state, but also overlapped in terms of who was responsible for the actual final resting place for the data.

 

 

In light of all this, DataReSource's game plan over the next six months is to build a community of "data hunters" via social networking technology where it can share parcels of data that explorationists are not able to locate via normal means.  

 

"Our hope is that by sharing the names of these missing data sets with a broader audience, people will step forward if they know the whereabouts of the data," Holmes said.

 

"If you are part of that network, and you see the name of a survey that you may have handled in years past, you will be able to provide feedback into the network to help the data to be tracked down. 

 

"Hopefully that lost piece of data that may have cost $5million to acquire can then make it back into the public domain.

 

"When we can't fulfil an order through our own means, the data set goes into the ‘lost and found' initiative and we invite people in to help us solve those mysteries."

 

While there are a few places to go for proprietary data shot by a seismic company that's for sale, DataReSource is the only company that does the hard core research to track down non-proprietary data. 

 

"Sometimes a very small piece of data can make a huge difference to somebody's exploration program. Often our searches involve a single well or a small range of shot points from a single seismic line," Holmes said.  

 

NOPTA was established on January 1, 2012 within the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science to oversee day to day administration of all petroleum and greenhouse gas titles in Commonwealth waters.

 

NOPTA's latest Stakeholder Survey Report 2017 comparing the agency's performance against the prior two years for timeliness, quality of communication, accessibility and responsiveness undertaken between March 27 and April 19 by KPMG revealed clients were "generally highly satisfied" with NOPTA's information.

 

However, notably, participants suggested more guidelines or fact sheets on specific "ambiguous" areas like well naming conventions, multi-client seismic data submissions and reporting requirements. 

 

Two stakeholders even perceived that "larger players had an advantage in their dealings with NOPTA and in relation to the regulatory framework in general".