How one change in capturing producing well transfers can improve Oklahoma production data quality

Recognizing how important it is to our customers to have access to the most complete and accurate production data available, IHS Markit has made significant improvements in providing more timely and accurate updates related to well transfers and the population of our current "producing" operator (i.e. Current Operator) attribute. Latent, invalid and incomplete operator well transfer data reported by the Oklahoma Tax Commission (OTC) has resulted in us modifying our sourcing process.

Historically, we relied on the OTC's monthly production updates to trigger change of our Current Operator attribute. The issue at hand results from the fact that the OTC is either way behind in updating these changes in the production record and/or they have not reported production for a particular lease within the time frame of the well transfer. Additionally, we have seen several occasions where the OTC has the correct Current Operator on their pubPun website, but the wrong operator in the digital file we were using as our primary source. Recognizing this as a concern, we re-engineered our existing processes to utilize the Oklahoma Corporation Commission's (OCC's) reported data which we've documented to be more timely and accurate than the OTC data. See figure 1 for an example of the challenges we face related to latency and inaccuracy by the OTC in getting the Operator well transfers reported.

Figure 1: Challenges related to latency and inaccuracy by the OTC

In this example, note the following:

• The OTC public website (pubPun) shows Limestone as the Operator.
• The OTC digital file shows Phillips 66 Company as the "Operator" but has actually switched the Operator and Purchaser names.
• OCC correctly has Whitestar as the Operator.

By re-engineering our processes and workflows utilizing the OCC reported data, we have updated over 15,000 wells with the correct "Current Operator". We are confident these changes will address the related issues our customers have been experiencing. Going forward, IHS Markit will continue to provide the most accurate and up-to-date Current Operator information available.

Learn more about our how our data quality processes impact your workflows.

Marc Messner is a Senior Manager of Data Transformation at IHS Markit.
Posted 20 July 2017

This article was published by S&P Global Commodity Insights and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.