In Canada at least, there is the accounting month and production month to deal with the delay in reporting of production volumes. The logistics of reporting volumetric information creates a lag of one month in the data so that July’s production data will be reported in the August accounting month. And I’m sure that everyone is familiar with the much loved amendment process for that volumetric data. The adjustment process never seems to end, I wonder if we’ll ever find a solution to it.
I think we have an interesting solution in People, Ideas & Objects. We talked about the material balance report the other day. While we noted the need to balance each report, and each input and output with the input and output of other material balance reports. And that each material balance report essentially represented a Joint Operating Committee. We also noted that we were deferring some of the discussion of our solution to the
Accounting Voucher module, which we are still doing. However, today we should note that there are some problems that need to be addressed in the
Partnership Accounting module that are a result of the adjustments to the material balance reports. That is that these material balance reports do shift and amend volumes of products around as time goes by and things are found to be incorrect. When the physical world is found to be inconsistent with the reporting, the reporting must change.
As I said I don’t want to get into into the solution today, other then noting that containing the problem within the domain of a Joint Operating Committee helps significantly. I want to add to the discussion of the material balance report by detailing the scope of the engineering problem that we have to solve. The first area of concern is that there are both daily and monthly volumes defining a period of time. Some of these volumes are “spec” vs. raw, products and by-products. Volumes are processed and gathered based on ownership and non-ownership of the processing facilities. There are in North America two, units of measures vs. metric reporting standards. How gas is nominated (daily) and marketed (annually). Finally the royalty holders and the ownership of the properties expect to earn something for their efforts. And each of these variables could generate their own amendment processes.
The myriad combinations of possibilities that happen within oil and gas have to be captured and handled within the systems that are used in oil and gas. That has not happened as of this date. The first aspect of solving this problem is to engineer the solution. Many have tried and have found their budgets to be to small for the job. Approaching this from the one producer perspective may seem like adequate funding, however, no one today is declaring success. If, as we have proposed in People, Ideas & Objects, aggregate the resources of the industry towards engineering the solution, this scope can be scaled, the costs to each producer will be incidental, and the results that each producer will realize will reflect the full scale of that software development effort.
The second aspect of the solution of this issue is to limit the scope of it. That is what we have done in People, Ideas & Objects. First by using the Joint Operating Committee as the key organizational construct of the innovative oil and gas producer. What we are doing is adopting the material balance report as a function of the Joint Operating Committee. Which in reality it is. If however we separate it from other Joint Operating Committee’s from an accounting perspective then we can begin to deal within just that JOC as its own autonomous legal entity, which it is. This discussion may initially not make sense until we get into the Accounting Voucher module, and we get into the final aspect of this solution which is where we encapsulate all of this reporting within the accounting system itself.
For the industry to successfully provide for the consumers energy demands, it’s necessary to build the systems that identify and support the Joint Operating Committee. Building the
Preliminary Specification is the focus of People, Ideas & Objects. Producers are encouraged
to contact me in order to support our
Revenue Model and begin their participation in these communities. Those individuals that are interested in joining People, Ideas & Objects
can join me here and begin building the software necessary for the successful and innovative oil and gas industry.
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