Our Oil and Gas White Paper, Part VII
People, Ideas & Objects claim is that the oil and gas industry in North America has not been profitable for over four decades. Serious accounting issues have overlooked the lack of real profitability and the slow and steady erosion of any and all value out of the industry. This has manifest itself into a deluded population of oil and gas producers that believe they’ve been successful, however their investors have been withholding support for the past number of years. The development of shale based reservoirs has accelerated the trajectory of their decline and we see now that the cashless producers have no understanding or appreciation of the issues, People, Ideas & Objects proposed solution, or for the commercialization of shale. The question that remains unanswered in many people’s minds is will shale ever become economic? A very dire situation that we’ve called for the full force of creative destruction to be used against the existing producers in the industry. We believe in addition to being an accounting issue, it has now manifest itself into chronic organizational and cultural issues.
The Preliminary Specification is ERP software that identifies and supports a reorganization of the producer firm and industries resources. Using the Joint Operating Committee as the key organizational construct of the dynamic, innovative, accountable and profitable oil and gas producer we are able to shift the compliance and governance frameworks of the bureaucracy into alignment with the legal, financial, operational decision making, cultural, communication, innovation and strategic frameworks of the Joint Operating Committee. This alignment brings about the speed, innovativeness and accountability that we seek in our producer firms. Once People, Ideas & Objects determined that the Joint Operating Committee was the necessary organizational construct for the future oil and gas producer and industry. I set about to conduct the research into what and how the producer and industry would operate when we made these changes. This was difficult work that took over a decade to complete and we were able to publish the Preliminary Specification as a workable model for oil and gas in December 2013. It currently consists of 12 modules and approximately 200,000 words that define what is necessary to resolve the issues and realize the opportunities that are present in the industry today, and the frameworks necessary to deal with those that arise in the future.
The key structural change that is made in the Preliminary Specification is the establishment of our user community and their associated service providers. These are a reallocation of the administrative and accounting resources that are currently employed within the oil and gas producers. By determining that accounting and administration are not key competitive advantages of the producer we can offload these tasks to service providers outside of the producer organization. That provides many key opportunities that enable the Preliminary Specification to operate in ways that the industry is incapable of doing today. What we’ll be doing in this process is converting all of the producers costs to variable costs based on production. If a property doesn’t produce a profit due to its low deliverability, high cost or other reasons it can be shut-in and its prior losses will no longer dilute the profitable operations from other properties. It will incur a null operation, no profit but also no loss. This property can then be moved to the producers inventory of properties that require the producers earth science and engineering innovations to return it to profitable operations. These shut-in reserves can therefore be saved for a time in which they can be produced profitably. These reserves will not have to carry and recover the additional losses as costs that would otherwise have been incurred if it continued to produce unprofitably. And the commodity markets will find the marginal cost based on only profitable oil and gas operations being produced in the industry. What we have essentially done is moved the producers fixed cost accounting and administrative capabilities to be the variable cost accounting and administrative capabilities of the industry, variable based on production.
Producers consider this collusion as a reason not to act and are unwilling to put the effort into making this industry a viable business. In fact what this is called is the decentralized production model which in the Preliminary Specification replaces what’s in use today and is commonly known as the high throughput production model. It’s not collusion and every other industry manages their inventories in similar fashion to ensure that they do not erode their pricing power. If making independent business decisions based on actual factual accounting of the determination of profitability is collusion, then we are in a strange new world indeed. Oil and gas commodities are subject to the principles of price makers. Producers believe they are price takers and therefore any action they take to increase or decrease production has no effect on commodity prices. One look at the recent history of the industry and we can see that OPEC has successfully removed production on more than one occasion and successfully rehabilitated the oil price. It would seem that producers believe that oil and gas commodities are price takers to ensure there is no need for them to act.
People, Ideas & Objects source of our software quality is our user community. Software that is not based on user input is useless in our opinion. Our user community will consist of approximately 3,000 individuals who will contribute their understanding to the model of the Preliminary Specification. That way we'll know that we’re providing the highest possible quality of software to the oil and gas industry. Each of our user community members will also be the principal involved in one of approximately 3,000 fully independent service provider organizations. There they’ll be provided with an exclusive license to manage a single process that the user community member’s contribution during our development was determined to be a critical component. Service providers will therefore not be competing on the basis of price. No one will hold another license for that process and without access to our software no one can come in and offer a similar service at a lower price than what the licensed service provider can. Service providers compete on a fundamentally different basis which include their competitive advantages of quality, specialization, the division of labor, automation, computers working for us not the other way around, innovation, leadership and integration to name just a few. These competitive advantages are inconsistent with having their flank constantly abused by repeated price competitors. Our service providers will be provided with the exclusive license to ensure they continue to focus and achieve their full competitive advantages. Besides the service providers are a cornerstone to building our $25.7 to $45.7 trillion value proposition for the oil and gas producers.
The mechanism in the Preliminary Specification that creates the null operation at a property is as follows. If the property is shut-in it will produce no data that goes into what we call our task and transfer network. If nothing goes through, the service providers will not receive anything in which they will act upon, process or generate their billing from. Therefore the cost of calculating and recording the butane sales for the property will be reported as zero and none of the service providers will have done any work that month for that property. Therefore the null operation is created, no profit but also no loss because all of the producers costs are variable. The service providers have the entire oil and gas industry inventory of properties as their client base. At anytime it may be that 15% of these properties are shut-in. If that is the case, and the service providers will have budgeted and planned for the possibility of that scenario, then they can accommodate this temporary 15% drop in their revenues. Enabling for the first time the situation where producers overhead costs are variable and indirectly controllable.