The Intellog Blog

Alberta Petroleum & Natural Gas Public Offerings for 2012-03-21 are now available. This data is formatted in CSV and is ready for upload to Accumap. The file can be downloaded here or by clicking the CSV icon, bottom right.

If you would like to be notified by email as soon as the reformatted CSV files are available in the future, please contact us or leave a comment below, and we will be happy to add you to our guaranteed spam-free email notification list. There is no charge for this service.

Background information can be found here, and please let us know what you think. Thanks for your interest and support.

Alberta Petroleum & Natural Gas Public Offerings for 2012-03-07 are now available. This data is formatted in CSV and is ready for upload to Accumap. The file can be downloaded here or by clicking the CSV icon, bottom right.

If you would like to be notified by email as soon as the reformatted CSV files are available in the future, please contact us or leave a comment below, and we will be happy to add you to our guaranteed spam-free email notification list. There is no charge for this service.

Background information can be found here, and please let us know what you think. Thanks for your interest and support.

Alberta Petroleum & Natural Gas Public Offerings for 2012-02-08 are now available. This data is formatted in CSV and is ready for upload to Accumap. The file can be downloaded here or by clicking the CSV icon, bottom right.

If you would like to be notified by email as soon as the reformatted CSV files are available in the future, please contact us or leave a comment below, and we will be happy to add you to our guaranteed spam-free email notification list. There is no charge for this service.

Background information can be found here, and please let us know what you think. Thanks for your interest and support.

Alberta Petroleum & Natural Gas Public Offerings for 2012-01-25 are now available. This data is formatted in CSV and is ready for upload to Accumap. The file can be downloaded here or by clicking the CSV icon, bottom right.

If you would like to be notified by email as soon as the reformatted CSV files are available in the future, please contact us or leave a comment below, and we will be happy to add you to our guaranteed spam-free email notification list. There is no charge for this service.

Background information can be found here, and please let us know what you think. Thanks for your interest and support.

Recently, I have been paying closer attention to the Other People You May Know links that come up when I make a new connection with LinkedIn. For a long time, they seemed way off — I didn’t know any of them. Then something happened, where all of a sudden the recommendations got a lot better. Then they got so much better, I really began to wonder exactly how LinkedIn was making the connections. Then I thought about the fact that my contacts are in iCloud. It couldn’t be, could it?

Case in point. About 10 or 12 years ago, I bought some bathroom tiles from a small, independent retailer. For whatever reason, I took the store manager’s card off the counter, and recorded it in my contact manager (whatever that was at the time). Well you can guess the next part; who shows up in my OPYMK list? The manager of the tile store. So, how does LinkedIn figure out that, when we have absolutely nothing in common other than a one time purchase made a decade ago, on the other side of a city with a population in excess of a million? And this is not an isolated, random coincidence — I have lots of examples like this.

Seriously…how do they know that? It’s almost as if…nah, it couldn’t be. Could it?

Alberta Petroleum & Natural Gas Public Offerings for 2012-01-11 are now available. This data is formatted in CSV and is ready for upload to Accumap. The file can be downloaded here or by clicking the CSV icon, bottom right.

If you would like to be notified by email as soon as the reformatted CSV files are available in the future, please contact us or leave a comment below, and we will be happy to add you to our guaranteed spam-free email notification list. There is no charge for this service.

Background information can be found here, and please let us know what you think. Thanks for your interest and support.

We have just posted basic well data (click CSV link below) for 101,664 Saskatchewan petroleum wells. This is derived from data provided directly from Saskatchewan Energy & Resources (SER), and is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. This means you’re free to download it without charge and use it as you see fit. We intend to provide regular updates which will include new wells and an increased number of data elements per well. Thanks to the staff at SER for great data provided promptly and efficiently.

This file is in CSV format, and is approximately 10.4MB. It is not a complete list of Saskatchewan wells, but it’s fairly close, and certainly sufficient for testing purposes. Columns are as follows:

• u2id A uuid that uniquely identifies the well. Intellog commits that this number will not change in subsequent versions of this data. The long term role for this identifier is described in detail in our previously published whitepaper, and complies with RFC4122.
• agencyLbl This is the license number assigned by the Saskatchewan Government.
• nm The verbose name of the well.
• latitudeAmt, longitudeAmt The lat/long (of course) of the surface location of the well and by convention, positive latitudes are north of the equator, and negative longitudes are west of the Prime Meridian.

This is the first part of a larger strategy to get every well in the Western Sedimentary Basin into a similar format, and to make the resulting list freely available to any and all with a use for it. For the most part, we are able to source this data from provincial regulatory agencies, with the significant and notable exception of Alberta. That, unfortunately, has been the object of a nearly four year struggle with the ERCB. If you can help with Alberta data, by all means, please get in touch by adding a comment below, or contact us directly. Please let us know what you think.

On October 6th and 7th, Intellog Inc. Founder and President Terence Gannon, spoke at The Cybera Summit: Opening Data for the Cloud. The presentation was entitled Open Data for the Oil and Gas Industry, and covered the underlying need for open source well data, and follows with a brief overview of progress being made toward making that a reality. It concludes with some discussion of business models which can be built over top of a substrate of open data.

The presentation starts at around 01:15 of the video, runs for about 10 minutes, and has another few minutes of questions at the end.

If there would be a venue where you feel this presentation (or a version thereof) would be a good agenda item, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We would love the opportunity to spread the word.

The leadership of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party has been decided, and the winner is Alison Redford, now sworn in as Premier. Premier Redford lost no time appointing a new Cabinet, but it seems to have more familiar faces than I would have expected when the cornerstone of her leadership campaign was ‘change’. It’s reasonable to give her the benefit of the doubt, particularly since there is a pretty good chance of an election in the Spring and all of the Cabinet decisions will be revisited at that time, anyway.

However, a new Premier and Cabinet is an invitation to send fresh missives regarding the ongoing battle to get free, easy and open access to oil & gas data currently under the stewardship of the Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB). A summary of the letters, along with links to the complete text of each:

Premier Alison Redford — I offer good luck and best wishes, along with a copy of the letter sent to her soliciting her statement on open data and her reply. The point, of course, is to remind the Premier that her position has been clearly documented and it’s fair for the electorate to expect to her to live up to this commitment. We are watching. [letter]

Hon. Dr. Ted Morton, Minister of Energy — This is no less than the third Minister of Energy I have contacted regarding this matter, and the strategy this time is ensure Minister Morton is aware of the commitment the Premier made during her campaign (copies of my correspondence with her are attached to his letter) and to encourage him to provide leadership to the ERCB and instruct them to make the General Well Data File freely available without further delay. [letter]

Hon. Diana McQueen, Minister of Environment and Water — It may be just a coincidence, but Minister McQueen is MLA for Drayton Valley-Calmar. Calmar is the town southwest of Edmonton where some residents were forced to demolish their own homes in order to fix a gas leak from abandoned wells beneath their properties. This situation seems to have arisen from a disconnect between the municipality, which issued the building permit, and the ERCB, which is in possession of the information regarding the gas wells. I urge Minister McQueen to spur and support efforts to obtain free and open access to data which might well prevent such an occurrence in the future. [letter]

A complete history of this effort can be found here, and if you would like further information, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Alberta Petroleum & Natural Gas Public Offerings for 2011-12-14 are now available. This data is formatted in CSV and is ready for upload to Accumap. The file can be downloaded here or by clicking the CSV icon, bottom right.

If you would like to be notified by email as soon as the reformatted CSV files are available in the future, please contact us or leave a comment below, and we will be happy to add you to our guaranteed spam-free email notification list. There is no charge for this service.

Background information can be found here, and please let us know what you think. Thanks for your interest and support.