Portal, portal, who’s got a portal?
Just about everyone now. So it seems only right that the Canadian energy industry should have its own portal. Or several. Companies and professional organizations are competing to be the first screen that you cast your bleary eyes on each morning.
Two Canadian energy portals seem to have a natural advantage because of their powerful backers. The first is the Petroleum Registry of Alberta (www.petroleumregistry.gov.ab.ca), which carries the clout of the government of Alberta, as well as major partners in the oil and gas industry.
This site provides a central point of contact for reporting required data to the Alberta government in electronic form. Linda Hesse, royalty co-ordinator at Husky Energy, says the new system eliminates the “middle man” and communication delays. She calls it a “huge leap into the future for both the Alberta government and oil and gas companies,” and says her company expects to save money by using it, even though there were some “teething problems.”
“Prior to the registry,” she says, “we used a third-party vendor application to load, edit, validate and send our royalty data to the Crown. Third-party keying services were also employed. Now these costs have been eliminated.”
The portal was constructed by Fujitsu Consulting (Canada). Fujitsu’s Dave Giles managed the project, which cost the Alberta government about $25 million and industry another $10 million. He says this isn’t the kind of software you just buy at Future Shop. “The regulations around the petroleum industry in Alberta are very specific, they have very specific rules depending on the type of well or facility that they’re operating. Also, their existing paper-based forms had a lot of redundant information across them.”
This system tries to ensure that everyone puts the right data in the single right place, at the right time. With 1,200 oil and gas companies to bring online, Giles says it was a huge education job.
The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) developed a fairly extensive training system, and there was a year-long series of training meetings.
There are now more than 8,000 registered user accounts. “The biggest issues were with the mom and pop shops, who didn’t even have a web browser,” says Giles, “so we had different models depending on the size of the organization.”
More than 95 per cent of the content of the registry is public information, and they’ve gone to great lengths to secure the remaining small percentage that is considered proprietary by the companies.
“The government runs the servers,” says Giles, “and we have firewalls and other techniques to keep out hackers. We’ve actually hired outside firms to do hacker-type tests against the system.”
Now of course, it’s a little hard to get excited about providing data, especially regarding royalties, to the government, even if it does save back-office costs.
Giles is quick to point out that there will be other advantages to the industry that have nothing to do with government reporting. “For example,” he says, “pipeline splits are purely an industry initiative, as is partner reporting.”
Hesse is enthusiastic about these advantages and hopes they come to fruition soon. Asked where she would like to see the registry go, Hesse likens what we have now to the foundation of a house.
“There are more storeys to be built in order to completely benefit from owning a home,” she says. “I believe the possibilities are limitless. I would like to see more infrastructure built into the registry in order to eliminate all the remaining paperwork . . . Other provinces could be brought on board to incorporate a single royalty reporting mechanism.”
This is all music to the ears of the Fujitsu folks, as is the possibility that the Alberta system might expand to other jurisdictions. “We’re going to look at Saskatchewan, and the Northwest Territories,” says Giles, “and CAPP has recommended it to British Columbia.”
One downside of the portal is that there’s not much there to look at for the public, since the bulk of the data is only visible to authorized users. So consider the Centre for Energy portal (www.centreforenergy.com).
With partners including CAPP, the Canadian Nuclear Association, EnCana Corporation, SciQ, the SEEDS Foundation and the Small Explorers and Producers Association of Canada, this site has lots of useful energy industry information.
You can see market prices, earnings reports, upcoming events, even energy-saving tips. My favourite part of the site is the “energy weather map” which allows you to determine if any of your fellow Canadians are freezing in the dark.
Then, you can consider calling your broker to go long on those energy stocks.
(Tom Keenan, I.S.P., CISSP, is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@ businessedge.ca)
