Reference Sites

The UK Oil Portal (built using FOXOPEN)

The Energy Resources and Development Unit (ERDU) of DECC is the body responsible for ensuring the maximum economic recovery of hydrocarbons (Oil and Gas) from the United Kingdom Continental Shelf (UKCS).

The UK Oil Portal has been designed and built using FOXOPEN to comply with government e-commerce targets whilst at the same time delivering real benefits in terms of more efficient ways of conducting business. ERDU are moving their North Sea consenting processes to the UK Oil Portal. It is the focus of all government / industry activity and has been designed with key objectives of making government to oil industry activity digital, paperless and efficient.

The Portal is shown diagrammatically below.

Oil companies use the Portal for requesting consents for oil and gas operations on the North Sea. It is also used to issue Regulatory enforcement notices. The Portal is the focus of all consents activities within ERDU, with other government departments and with oil companies. The process involves oil companies interfacing with the Portal, workflow procedures controlling the approval processes and digitally signed documents moved automatically into and made available from DECC’s document management system. Oil companies can deliver data, digitally signed or unsigned, to the Repository on the Portal. Security is paramount and is managed by a sophisticated user account system that has been the subject of extensive audit and regular penetration tests.
The Portal automatically updates two oil industry web sites; DEAL, the site where exploration data is held, and EEMS, the environmental monitoring site.

As the systems were being designed it became apparent that to ensure that ERDU fully complied with various standards and to ensure that the contracts produced were sufficient to be used as legally admissible evidence then a high level of assurance was necessary. This led to the need for digital certificates. ERDU worked with major oil companies and UKOOA (the oil industry trade association) to devise a Trust Scheme for the issue of digital certificates for the oil industry. The target was a low cost, sound set of rules that could be used outside of the regulatory functions.

The applications currently deployed through the Portal include

• Drilling consents and well operations - Environmental consents
• Chemical consents for wells, platforms and pipelines - Production reporting
• Decommissioning - Security of Supply
• Licensing rounds and licence records - Produced Water Trading
  

All of these applications are being extended to include new facilities such as web services, digitally signed submissions and links to standard GIS packages.

Following an internal DECC re-organisation, the potential of the Portal technology started to be recognised and systems have been developed for case handling and data reporting systems in other areas of DECC. The Portal technology has many uses but is particularly effective in web enabled systems that incorporate on-line forms, workflow, data reporting, document generation, digital signatures, user account management and web services.

The technology allows prototypes to be built very quickly and for system development to be an interactive process with users and developers. A target hardware and software infrastructure on which to deploy an application need not be expensive.