The Client
This Houston-based energy company primarily focuses on the exploration for and production of natural gas. As an operator, the company derives the vast majority of its operating income and cash flow from its E&P business. In addition to these core areas of operations, it actively seeks to develop new conventional exploration projects as well as unconventional plays with significant exploration and exploitation potential.
The Challenge
The company faced a common administrative burden among E&P operators: regular communication with working interest owners. Typically an operating agreement requires the operator to communicate basic information – e.g., drilling reports, completion reports, gas analysis reports, etc. – to non-operating partners throughout the life of each well in which they have a financial interest. For any operator, gathering this information for partners is complex, extremely time-consuming, and labor-intensive.
The Solution
For this company, the partner communication challenge had grown due to increased drilling projects for which it functioned as managing partner. The company wanted to automate its internal processes for gathering partner information and have the ability to “publish” the information so that working interest partners could access their well information via an extranet partner portal. Based on a successful proof of concept prototype of a partner extranet portal, Stonebridge developed a custom extranet portal solution for distributing information to the client’s working interest partners.
Built on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, the partner extranet portal provides a secure, self-service mechanism for “read only” viewing of key daily reports on the performance and status of partner-associated wells. After logging in to the portal via Form-Based Authentication, a partner can view a list of its well interests and follow a simple navigation structure built in ASP.NET TreeView to individual sites for partner-associated wells. By utilizing custom SharePoint WebParts, each well site includes a breakdown of key well master data, derived from the operator’s line of business systems. In addition, a partner can browse the information published for its wells or search for information based on a number of criteria, including keyword or document type via a custom “wildcard search” WebPart. Partners also have the ability to zip and download documents for use in their own local environment.
The Benefits
- Standard, easy-to-use mechanism for working interest owners to view structured and unstructured well data
- Detailed audit trail showing when documents were added to the system and which partners have viewed them and when via built-in
- SharePoint document auditing
- Managed security at three levels, providing greater flexibility to the operator in securing this information.
Other custom development tools used to create this solution:
- Microsoft.Practices v4.0
- SQL Server 2005
- .NET Framework 3.5
- SharePoint solution package for easy deployment on any SharePoint server