Security & Access Control — Business and Technical Specifications. Part I

Note to Our User Community

This specification represents the beginning of the development process rather than its conclusion. It establishes the purposes, operating concepts, essential capabilities, responsibilities, controls, and architectural boundaries presently understood to be necessary for Synallagi. It does not contain every requirement that developers will eventually need, nor should it be interpreted as prescribing every design decision that will be made.

As custody of the specification passes from its originator to the Synallagi user community, responsibility for its continued development passes with it. Members of the community will be expected to test its assumptions against their experience, identify missing requirements, resolve ambiguities, and develop the operational detail needed to transform its concepts into a working product.

This transfer is not intended to constrain the community to the ideas presently documented. Members should feel free to propose new capabilities within the community, challenge existing assumptions, and pursue better ways of satisfying the purposes of Synallagi. They should build collaborative support for their ideas and support material proposals with detailed analysis of the business need, affected users, alternatives, benefits, costs, risks, dependencies, authorities, controls, and consequences involved.

Ideas should be welcomed while they are still forming. However, an idea should become a development requirement only after it’s been examined sufficiently to demonstrate that it addresses a genuine need, fits the wider product, and is supported by those whose work or responsibilities it will affect directly.

The community must avoid adding products, technologies, processes, controls, or complexity merely because they are available. Technical sophistication is not a benefit by itself. Every material addition should correspond to a defined business, operational, security, regulatory, or architectural requirement. The objective is to satisfy the needs of Synallagi completely and responsibly without burdening its users, developers, operators, or producers with unnecessary complexity and cost.

Under the Synallagi user community license, a qualified member may receive exclusive rights and corresponding responsibilities for a defined process domain that the member undertakes to manage on behalf of the oil & gas industry. These rights establish accountable stewardship. They are not merely permission to influence the product or control a body of functionality.

The Synallagi user community license establishes the following foundational principles of accountable stewardship and independent governance. These rights ensure that the community remains the primary driver of the product:

• Exclusive authority to modify, develop, or create derivative works from the underlying intellectual property of Synallagi is reserved solely for licensed community members.
• People, Ideas & Objects developers maintain an exclusive focus on community-led requirements, remaining unresponsive to external influences that have not been reconciled through our user community.
• Members operate as independent business participants with autonomous budgetary control, ensuring their contributions represent genuine industry needs rather than the interests of external funding sources.

The license provides for the service-provider organization that the member will own and operate to implement, operate, maintain, support, and continue developing the processes within that domain. The member must therefore consider the complete life of the process, including:

• Maintaining its business and technical specifications.
• Building informed and representative support for proposed requirements.
• Defining the information, actions, authority, events, controls, and evidence required.
• Reconciling competing user needs and documenting material decisions.
• Coordinating requirements that affect other Synallagi process domains.
• Working with architects and developers to produce compatible solutions.
• Establishing testing, acceptance, security, service, operational, and maintenance requirements.
• Providing the documentation, training, support, governance, and continuity necessary for dependable industry use.
• Managing future changes without losing the purpose, integrity, compatibility, or accumulated knowledge of the process domain.

Exclusive stewardship does not create unlimited authority to expand a process domain, introduce unnecessary complexity, or make decisions affecting other domains without consultation. Every material addition must remain traceable to a demonstrated industry requirement. Changes crossing process-domain boundaries must be collaboratively developed and reconciled within the wider Synallagi specification.

The proficiency demonstrated by Elon Musk in executing scientific endeavors of immense scale and intricacy remains unrivaled. Central to his methodology is an "algorithm"—a set of principles he asserts are fundamental to his success. Within Synallagi, this framework serves as a vital conceptual cornerstone, guiding our user community in the meticulous development and delivery of their products. As detailed in Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk, this algorithm consists of five essential components. (Isaacson, 2023, pp. 282, 284–285)

1. Question every requirement.

All requirements should be attached to the name of the person who made it. Always question the requirements, no matter who made it, and then try to improve them. p. 284

People, Ideas & Objects will require each of our user community members and developers to digitally sign their contributions. This process offers two key benefits: it ensures accountability by identifying the responsible individual, and it helps allocate service provider organizations to specific processes within Synallagi. The allocation will be determined by an AI algorithm developed by our user community, with digital signatures assisting in the guiding of appropriate assignments.

2. Delete any part or process you can.

You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough. p. 284

Given the oil & gas industry's high rate of data distribution and duplication, this step challenges us to consider whether a single data source could eliminate redundancy. For further insight, refer to E.F. Codd’s Relational Theory in the bibliography. Where sharing the same data to different users who perceive the data differently.

A key lesson from software development is that while adding features is simple, it often leads to feature bloat; true innovation lies in simplifying the interface by removing unnecessary elements—even if that removal faces resistance.

3. Simplify and optimize.

This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist. p. 284

Although straightforward, this step underscores the time constraints often imposed by quarterly requirements, which frequently force organizations to bypass this global perspective. In many ERP implementations, budgets dictate the elimination of the user committee is the first element skipped, making our prioritization of our user community a distinct competitive advantage, resulting in improved software quality.

4. Accelerate cycle time.

Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted. p. 284

5. Automate.

That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out. p. 285

“If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible,” Musk told him, “then unconventional thinking is necessary.” p. 282

Synallagi divides automation into two distinct areas. The first area encompasses the automation integrated with Oracle Cloud ERP, included upon discovery. The second area involves automating the processes within Synallagi itself, which has been deferred to the third phase of development. For further details, please refer to our 2/10/2025 paper. Innovative Organization Excellence: How Elon Musk and Visionary Leaders Build High-Performance Enterprises.

Licensed members must preserve reasonable opportunities for affected users and producers, Joint Operating Committees and markets to contribute knowledge, question assumptions, propose alternatives, and participate in validation. Exclusive rights establish responsibility and accountability; they must not prevent the collaboration from which the quality and legitimacy of Synallagi will be derived.

The original specification provides the foundation. Our user community will transform that foundation into complete and testable requirements. Licensed process-domain stewards will establish and operate the service-provider organizations through which those requirements can be implemented, maintained, supported, and improved over time.

The quality of Synallagi ERP software will ultimately depend upon the quality of our user community and their stewardship.

Introduction

Joint Operating Committees are the key organizational construct of a dynamic, innovative, accountable and profitable oil & gas company. It is the interactions of many producers, service providers and suppliers who are involved in the day to day commercial and strategic concerns of that Joint Operating Committee that we need to concern ourselves with. The Security & Access Control module's focus is to ensure the right people have the right access to the right information with the right authority. This is at the right time at the right place and through the right device.

Throughout Synallagi we discuss two of the most pressing operational issues in the oil & gas industry. Those being the demand for earth science & engineering effort is increasing with each barrel produced. This is best represented by the steep escalation of oil & gas exploration and production costs. At the same time, critical earth science & engineering resources are fixed and difficult to expand. And with the anticipated retirement of this brain trust in the next twenty years, the problem becomes critical. The second issue regards the manner in which the administrative and accounting resources are organized within the industry. With Synallagi the need for each producer to develop their own administrative and accounting capabilities internally is replaced by an overall industry capability. Then each producer can access those resources on a variable cost basis with direct charges to the Joint Operating Committee. This provides operational flexibility in how a producer approaches its strategic and tactical needs to their distinct competitive advantages.

Business Specifications

Two Types of Data

When we talk about the various people within the producer firms affiliated with a Joint Operating Committee. And the number of Joint Operating Committees that a firm may have an interest in. And the number of people a firm employs. Access control becomes challenging. It becomes a challenge when we consider that people certainly should have the access required, but the level of trust they may have with respect to other partner organizations is probably not as strong. That is to say, does using the Joint Operating Committee as the key organizational construct of a dynamic, innovative, accountable and profitable oil & gas producer, open the producer firm to data loss? This is how People, Ideas & Objects deal with the access and trust issue in the Security & Access Control module.

3.10 Data entitlement

A data entitlement identifies the resources and records to which a privilege applies. Relevant scopes may include organization, business unit, ledger, Joint Operating Committee, property, well, agreement, partner, marketplace, wallet, blockchain address, work order, Authorization for Expenditure, voucher, settlement, or transaction.

Oracle AI Database 26ai or a later approved release is the intended principal data platform. Synallagi should therefore be treated in significant part as database-centred development, while access remains governed consistently through the application, policy, integration, and database layers.

When we concern ourselves with the data and information of the producer firm. We concern ourselves with the information cleared by the various Joint Operating Committees that the oil & gas producer’s interest is in. We can all agree that this information is proprietary and subject to each producer firm's internal policies. (Information such as reserves data, accounting information, internal reports and correspondence, strategy documents.) What we're concerned about is the information and data held in the Accounting Voucher module and the associated data common to the joint account. (well file, agreements, production data, capital and operating costs, revenue and royalties.)

Close analysis of these two types of data and information held within the firm and the Joint Operating Committee falls within the proprietary and partnership domains. In Canada at least, most data and information regarding well operations can be freely obtained through various regulatory agencies. Nonetheless, the majority of the data is shared through the partnership who have an interest in the data and information. Which is not the case with the producer firm's data. Most of the information is kept close at hand and reported through filtered reserve report summaries and annual reports. Therefore keeping a handle on proprietary data, while operating the Joint Operating Committee as the key organizational construct of the innovative oil & gas producer, as proposed by People, Ideas & Objects, does not present any data leakage.

Access control can therefore be limited by restricting any company personnel from viewing other companies' files. Which is a given. While in People, Ideas & Objects access control is restricted to the firm's Joint Operating Committees and the firm's files only. To extend this further, we would limit access to the appropriate roles within the firm. Then it is up to our user community to define a standard set of generic roles in which access is required to certain data types. This would apply to the types of operations handled by that role, for example, read, insert, update, delete. These generic roles could then be assigned to each individual within the organization based on their needs. Assigning multiple roles for more complex access. Access to proprietary data would be restricted to company personnel only.

Industrial Command & Control (ICC)

Throughout Synallagi we've discussed our solution to one of the premier issues the oil & gas industry faces. That is the demand for earth science & engineering effort per barrel of oil increases with each barrel produced. This is best represented by the steep escalation of oil & gas exploration and production costs over time. At the same time, critical earth science & engineering resources are fixed and difficult to expand in the short or medium term. Add to that the anticipated retirement over the next twenty years of the current brain trust of the industry and the problem becomes a critical concern.

What is proposed through the People, Ideas & Objects software application modules ICC is that the producer's operational strategy avoids the “operator” concept. Instead, it pools these technical resources through each of their partnerships represented in their Joint Operating Committees. That way the inefficiencies that would have been present in the industry can be made available and used through industry wide, producer focused, advanced and advancing specialization and division of labor. Where many of the lower end processes are offloaded to service providers who specialize in that basic skill on behalf of many producers. This is done in a geographical area or other specialization. And each individual producer focuses on a specialized element of science as it develops and innovates upon that.

People, Ideas & Objects believe producers will soon be unable to commercially support the full scale of engineering & earth science disciplines tasks and responsibilities as they have in house. This will be due to the shortages of resources, the cost escalation of these resources in the market due to their shortages, the expansion of demand from higher production volumes to achieve energy independence, the demands for more science in each incremental barrel of oil produced, the anticipated, substantial expansion of the sciences and the need to innovate upon that expanding science. For producers to maintain a broadened division of labor to deal with these issues and “operatorship” capabilities, it will extend them beyond any producer's commercial capacity.

What these concepts demand is what the Security & Access Control module is designed to provide through the ICC. The People, Ideas & Objects system must provide access to the right person at the right time and at the right place. This is with the right authority and the right information. With the ICC there will be a manner in which the technical and all the resources pooled from the producers, interact with the appropriate governance, compliance and industry standard chain of command.

Before the hierarch, a commercial development of the 20th century, only the military structure existed to organize large populations of individuals. The main difference between the two is subtle but significant. Military structures are broader and flatter than hierarchy. That is one of the ideals we are seeking, but the more significant feature is the ability for the chain of command to span multiple internal and external organizational structures and to move resources from different areas of the military through standardization.

The nature of people working through the industry-standard chain of command layered over the Joint Operating Committee will include all oil & gas disciplines. The contributions of staff, financial and technical resources will include all those employed by the industry today. I could foresee many office buildings being refurbished to accommodate the staff of a single Joint Operating Committee of a large property. There, staff from the different producers may be seconded to provide support for the Joint Operating Committee. They may work for a single Joint Operating Committee, not for any particular producer firm.

As background we should recall that each individual would have different access levels and authorizations to access to People, Ideas & Objects Synallagi. Assuming different roles and responsibilities, they would impose different access levels to data, information, processes and functionality. People, Ideas & Objects application modules rely on the Security & Access Control module to implement Industrial Command & Control. This structure, particularly in a Joint Operating Committee, would weave multiple producer firms under one industry standard chain of command. The interface ensures that all processes are monitored for compliance, governance, and overall completeness.

A principle of Synallagi is that North American oil & gas producers will earn the investment community’s support through competitive performance in capital markets—and through exceptional accountability, compliance, and governance.

Based on People, Ideas & Objects’ long-term observation and analysis of producer performance, the industry’s accountability, compliance and governance appear to operate at approximately one-quarter of the standard expected of a genuinely competitive industry. This is an informed analytical assessment rather than the result of a formal quantitative study.

For decades, the sector consumed capital while failing to deliver the fiduciary discipline investors should expect. It took the extraordinary endowment of shale—and destroyed it rather than creating any value.

After eleven years of raising these issues, their investors have seen little to no evidence of meaningful remediation. Investor trust must be earned through performance, accountability, and governance—not presumed. This begins with the Security & Access Control module.

Access, Roles and Responsibilities

This topic discusses the way authorizations, roles and responsibilities are handled in the Security & Access Control module of Synallagi. We should discuss the topic of delegating authority and responsibility during absences, which can come up from time to time.

As background we should recall that each individual would have different access levels and authorizations in terms of access to the People, Ideas & Objects systems. Assuming various roles and responsibilities, they would impose different access levels to data, information, processes and functionality. In addition, Security & Access Control is the key module for implementing Industrial Command & Control across People, Ideas & Objects. This structure, particularly in a Joint Operating Committee, would weave multiple producer firms under one chain of command. To ensure compliance, governance, and overall process completeness, it will need to provide an interface to ensure all processes are monitored.

Throughout Synallagi there is the perception of a heightened role for technology in enabling authorization to conduct operations. Thus, the ability to do things and get things done depends on collaborating with partners and authorizing actions through processes managed by the systems. This participation dictates that the designation of the roles in the Security & Access Control module “means” more than just data access; it imposes authority and responsibility to undertake actions on behalf of Joint Operating Committees and / or producer firms.

It is necessary to assign this authority within the Security & Access Control module during any absence. If someone with authority and responsibility is away for whatever reason, they should be able to assign their authority to another person. This will enable them to fill that role while away. This will ensure that the process isn’t held up during their absence. Delegations of authority have been used for years in large firms and with a system that imposes authorizations and responsibilities on specific roles, the ability to temporarily move them down, across or up the chain of command is a necessity to keep the organization functioning.

Lastly we should talk about the interface that helps to identify missing elements in a process. It would simply show the command structure of the people assigned to a Joint Operating Committee or a process. It would show their related role, authorizations and responsibilities. If someone is away, it would indicate who took over their role. It would help to identify how they could impose a chain of command to fill any vacancies. This would be particularly helpful if the role or process needed to be documented for compliance purposes.

Business Specification Conclusion

It is important to remember that here in the Security & Access Control module of Synallagi. That the role and identity-based Industrial Command & Control (ICC) as conceived here has not been implemented, developed or conceived anywhere else before. We are taking role and identity-based management to the next level with the ICC. This is done through the usage of the Joint Operating Committee, through pooling and taking advantage of specialization and the division of labor in the oil & gas industry.

Why are we bothering with the ICC and the Joint Operating Committee pooling of resources? The issue we are resolving is the finite number of earth science & engineering resources available to the industry. With the anticipated retirement levels in the next 20 years. With the time requirements to bring on increased levels of resources. And most importantly with the demands for more energy, and the demands for more earth science & engineering in each barrel of oil equivalent produced. We face long-term shortages of critical resources. The need to organize the industry, exploit specialization and division of labor, and Professor Paul Romer's theory of non-rival costs is necessary to increase the output from the same number of resources. Doing this without pooling the resources in the Joint Operating Committee will cause the producer firm to broaden the scale of their earth science & engineering capabilities beyond what would be a commercially viable concern. Synallagi notes that we have contributions from earth scientists and engineers from multiple producers working together to meet the objectives of the Joint Operating Committee. Therefore we need a means to organize themselves and that is the Industrial Command & Control of the Security & Access Control module.

How the ICC will be implemented will be determined by our user community. However, I can speculate that the Joint Operating Committee will have standard roles and identities used throughout the industry. Standardization provides many benefits and will be necessary in this instance to make technology work. One of the key benefits of standardization is enhanced innovation. The need to have the various areas "covered" regarding compliance and other requirements will require a standard template used by everyone. Everyone will know that that position is responsible for that role and responsibility. When Joint Operating Committees are small and have only a few people assigned, multiple roles can be assigned to one individual.

There are security and access control issues associated with the service industry and particularly service providers accessing People, Ideas & Objects systems and data. Removing administrative and accounting resources from the producer firms and organizing them in their own service providers provides significant operational flexibility to the innovative and profitable oil & gas producer. The Security & Access Control module ties these disparate organizations into highly organized replacements for the current bureaucracy. Contributing substantially to People, Ideas & Objects' overall tangible portion of our value proposition.

With the natural division in the types of information held within a producer and Joint Operating Committee. Producers will know that Synallagi can deliver the right information to the right people at the right time. Leakage of proprietary information can be mitigated by isolating company data. This is due to its unique nature and Oracle Label Securities' ability to restrict access to database fields.

Oracle’s products provide a strong layer of mission critical capabilities in the Security & Access Control module. Oracle provides comprehensive coverage of security, access control, audit, back up, recovery and roll management to name just a few of the highlights provided. Although this comes with additional costs, I am certain that no one will argue with the quality and peace of mind that these products bring.

21st Century Marketplace Service Providers Sec 2 - Part XXXVIII

- Producers Continued

Price Maker Strategy  

In this section we look to describe the role the service providers play in ensuring producers achieve and maintain their renewed cultural objectives of reserves preservation, performance and profitability. Synallagi prepares monthly standard and objective financial statements for each and every Joint Operating Committee. In addition this would extend to each well within the Joint Operating Committee. These are used to determine whether profitability has objectively been achieved and if so production continues in order to maximize their assets value and ensure any losses do not diminish earnings. In summary that is our price maker strategy or decentralized production model. 

The precision, accuracy and the timeliness of the information prepared by the service providers is a core principle of the accounting profession. Service providers sit between the producer firms and our user community members who own and operate the licensed processes the service provider is currently operating in. It is an undertaking of the service providers to ensure the industry is subject to standardized and objective accounting methods to ensure that producers can and will know that if a, or part of a Joint Operating Committee reports a lack of profitability, that is on the basis of the same assessment criteria used throughout the industry. Therefore shutting in a well or property is the appropriate action to increase their profitability, preserve their reserves and reduce their costs.

A controversial aspect of Synallagi is our price maker strategy. Where producers are enabled to evaluate each and every well or property through standardized, objective, actual, factual financial statements for each well or property each month. If the well or property should be unprofitable Synallagi has converted all of the producer's costs to variable, including overhead. Therefore if they shut-in the well or property that is losing money they incur a null operation, no profit and no loss, and they’ll gain the significant advantages listed below. 

■ Maximized Profitability: Producers maximize profits when losses from unprofitable wells or properties no longer dilute the gains from profitable ones. It’s common sense to limit one's losses.

■ Strategic Reserve Management: Holding reserves until they can be produced profitably means avoiding the incremental costs associated with losses from unprofitable production. Reserves are not obligations to produce at any price. They are assets to be managed prudently.

■ Cost Reduction: Keeping oil & gas as reserves reduces production, transportation, processing, storage and administrative costs tied to excess, unprofitable output.

■ Variable Overhead Costs: Overhead costs are fully covered when profitably produced. That cash incurred is therefore returned within 60 days to the producers. Any shut-in production will not incur overhead as all Joint Operating Committee costs are turned variable in Synallagi. 

■ Synnefa.ai Our Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas: Shared administrative and accounting infrastructure costs of software and services based on the Cloud distribution model are tangibly lower.

■ Market Stability: Removing unprofitable production allows commodity markets to find the marginal cost, establishing fair prices for all production. Eliminating industries' boom / bust cycle. Markets provide one thing, and only one thing, a price.

■ Reserves Valuations: Market prices accurately reflect the value of producers petroleum reserves. Higher commodity prices expand the volumes of proven recoverable reserves and fulfill officers and directors fiduciary duty to safeguard assets.

■ Innovation Opportunities: While unprofitable properties are shut in, producers can innovatively explore ways to increase production volumes, reduce costs, or expand reserves. To return the well or property to profitable production.

■ Replacement Value: The realized market price of oil & gas must reflect the current market’s costs of exploration and development. That is the cost of a replacement volume of energy produced today. 

■ Production Discipline: Using profitability as the criterion for production decisions is the only fair and reasonable method of instilling production discipline. Producers that continue to produce unprofitably will continue to incur losses and have difficulty competing in North American capital markets.

■ Alleged Capital Discipline: Producers claim by cutting spending on drilling and completions is their method of resolving low prices. Capital discipline is at best a dull, blunt instrument. As we see today, it is the willing destruction of productive capacity. What it also does is shift the bust of the boom / bust cycle to the service industry to suffer exclusively. 

■ Innovation as a Foundation: Higher commodity prices finance greater innovative activity.

■ Effectively Eliminating the Boom / Bust Cycle: Dynamic changes to the producers production profile ensure they remain profitable and are aware when industry overbuilding has begun.

■ Commodity Values Realization: Each barrel of oil equivalent (boe) delivers the equivalent of 10,000 to 25,000 man-hours of labor to the consumer. This represents an irreplaceable value proposition, priced in January 2026 as high as $0.006 per labor hour, yet sourced from a finite supply. It is our responsibility to future generations to ensure this vital resource is not squandered.

We must demonstrate that all production was profitable and that we passed on a robust, prosperous, profitable and viable industry to future generations. Price makers only bring on new production when it is profitable. 

■ Consumers will use the Products Price to Make Decisions: Consumer decisions based on profitable prices will stabilize the demand side of the market.

■ Independent Decisions: Our price maker strategy is built on making independent business decisions, using actual, factual financial information at the property level. This is sound business practice, not collusion, which renders any such allegations moot.

■ Profitable Operations: Conceptually, profitable operations would provide a producer with all the financial resources they need to conduct their business. Providing leadership with the independence to set their own direction. End the systemic dilution of their shareholders interests to fund capital expenditures and build value.

■ Achieves North American Swing Producer Status: Oil & gas are now both global commodities subject to the supply / demand dynamics of these markets. Shale and heavy oil are unquestionably the most costly produced anywhere in the world. The role of swing producer is to add or remove production as required to stabilize prices adequate for its markets to provide for profitable operations. 

Producer Practices

Many of the structural problems affecting North American oil and gas are neither geological nor technological. They are the consequence of management practices that have become embedded within the industry’s culture. Reserve valuation, profitability, production discipline, and the recurring boom-bust cycle are not independent issues; they are symptoms of the same organizational failure.

One contributing factor is the widespread reliance on capitalizing expenditures into property, plant, and equipment rather than recognizing their economic effect on operational profitability. Although entirely appropriate for external financial reporting, these accounting treatments can obscure the underlying economics of individual wells and properties when they become the primary basis for operational decision-making. The result is an inflated perception of profitability, encouraging continued investment, excessive capacity expansion, and ultimately production levels that exceed economically profitable demand.

For commodities such as oil and natural gas, these distortions have consequences far beyond the individual producer. Oil and natural gas markets exhibit the characteristics of price makers rather than price takers. Relatively small changes in aggregate supply can produce disproportionately large changes in commodity prices. Once production depresses prices below sustainable profitability, every additional uneconomic barrel or cubic foot contributes to further value destruction. In practical terms, unprofitable production is overproduction.

The treatment of associated natural gas from the Permian Basin illustrates this problem. The Permian’s primary economic objective is oil production; however, every barrel of oil also produces valuable associated natural gas. Rather than treating this gas as a strategic resource in its own right, industry practices have historically subordinated its commercial value to oil production objectives. Local oversupply has repeatedly driven substantial price discounts, and in some periods even negative pricing, at regional trading points such as Waha Hub. Those discounted prices subsequently influence continental pricing through Henry Hub, unnecessarily depressing the benchmark price used throughout North America. The result is that localized production decisions materially reduce the value of natural gas across an entire continent.

These practices, together with others of similar effect, contributed directly to the collapse of investor confidence in North American producer firms. By 2015, capital markets had largely withdrawn their support from existing producer business models. Synallagi had already identified these structural deficiencies in 2012, providing both the motivation and the opportunity for producers to adopt a more disciplined approach before investor confidence was lost. Instead, little changed. The consequence has been the measurable destruction of trillions of dollars of shareholder value through persistent overproduction and inadequate production discipline.

Financial reporting is designed to describe the past. Management accounting should determine the future.

Synallagi addresses these issues by introducing standardized, objective, and timely management accounting for every well, property, and Joint Operating Committee. Financial information is no longer produced primarily for historical reporting purposes. Instead, it becomes an operational decision-making system that enables engineers, geologists, accountants, and management to evaluate actual economic performance using consistent financial measures. Production decisions therefore become grounded in demonstrated profitability rather than accounting conventions, legacy practices, organizational inertia, or cultural assumptions.

Resolving and Reconstructing

Decades of operating under the current industry model have left North American oil & gas in a position where sustained profitability is no longer achievable under prevailing price structures, cost structures, and organizational assumptions. The industry’s financial value has been systematically depleted. The reserves remain. The infrastructure remains. Yet both continue to operate within an organizational architecture that delivers acceptable returns only under exceptional market conditions. By my assessment, those conditions have existed in only seven of the past thirty-nine years.

The result is an industry whose assets have been progressively overleveraged while its competitiveness has steadily declined. An entrenched culture of simply “muddling through” has replaced disciplined organizational improvement. The industry now performs at a level that I estimate to be approximately twenty-five percent of the competitive level that its reserves, infrastructure, and human capabilities should be capable of delivering.

Producer organizations have demonstrated that they are unwilling, unable, or institutionally incapable of resolving these issues independently. The challenge is no longer one of awareness. It is one of organizational structure, decision-making authority, incentives, governance, and culture. Their operating assumptions have become so deeply embedded that even their investors have been unable to alter their course.

The strategic question is therefore straightforward. How does North American oil & gas recover natural gas value currently being lost at a rate approaching thirty-five billion dollars each month? Equally important, how does it restore the profitability of oil production? These objectives cannot be achieved through a single initiative, a single executive, or a single organization. They require coordinated action by those possessing the knowledge, capabilities, authority, and commercial incentives to implement thousands of incremental improvements throughout the Joint Operating Committees that govern exploration and production across the continent.

That responsibility belongs to our user community and their service provider organizations.

Their commercial incentive is clear. They earn a continuing annuity only by creating measurable and recurring value for producer organizations. Their work is not traditional consulting delivered through isolated engagements. It is a disciplined, measurable, and continuous process of improving profitability, accountability, operational performance, and organizational effectiveness across every property they support.

Financial reporting continues to satisfy the requirements of external stakeholders by accurately describing historical performance. Management accounting serves a different purpose. It guides future operating decisions. Synallagi provides the standardized management accounting framework that enables Joint Operating Committees to evaluate alternatives consistently, allocate capital more effectively, and improve profitability one operating decision at a time.

As Artificial Intelligence assumes responsibility for much of the ongoing analytical and administrative work after the service provider organization has completed its contribution, this should not be viewed as a limitation of the model. It is the intended outcome. Human expertise defines, designs, governs, validates, and continuously improves the organizational architecture. Artificial Intelligence then applies that knowledge consistently across time, scale, and repetition, allowing our user community and their service provider organizations to redirect their attention toward the next opportunity to create value.

Synallagi’s Targeting Framework independently evaluates and measures those contributions each month. It quantifies the value created, allocates compensation accordingly, and enables service provider organizations to move from one user community member to another, systematically improving performance across the industry. Knowledge is no longer confined within a single producer, department, or property. It becomes organizational capital, governed through Intellectual Property, deployed through service provider organizations, coordinated through the Marketplace Modules, executed through the Business Operations Management Module, and scaled through Artificial Intelligence.

An industry possessing resources of this magnitude, yet producing such limited financial returns, represents one of the greatest unrealized economic opportunities in North America. The contradiction is striking. The reserves exist. The infrastructure exists. The demand exists. What has been missing is the organizational architecture: the software, governance, marketplace design, standardized management accounting, accountability, and commercial incentives required to convert those assets into consistently profitable enterprises.

The tools now available are extraordinary, and they continue to improve at an accelerating pace. Artificial Intelligence, Intellectual Property, hyperspecialization, marketplace design, and disciplined Enterprise Resource Planning software together provide a practical pathway to reconstruct North American oil & gas around profitability rather than activity. For those prepared to understand and execute this opportunity, the value to be created is substantial, durable, and continental in scale.

This is not simply the resolution of long-standing industry problems. It is the reconstruction of North American oil & gas as a more dynamic, innovative, accountable, profitable, and competitive industry. In that sense, Synallagi represents more than a software platform. It establishes the organizational architecture through which that reconstruction becomes possible. Creating a new, reconstructed culture of reserves preservation, performance and profitability.

Conclusion — A New Discipline

As this paper developed, one realization became increasingly clear. The discussion has grown beyond the boundaries of People, Ideas & Objects. That outcome was always anticipated. Synallagi was never intended to be developed by a single organization indefinitely. Its long-term evolution belongs to our user community and their service provider organizations, whose collective knowledge, experience, and innovation will continue to extend the architecture long after its initial implementation.

This paper has demonstrated that service provider organizations are far more than outsourced administrative resources. They become the mechanism through which knowledge, innovation, accountability, and profitability continuously enter the oil & gas industry. Their role is not episodic consulting. It is the systematic improvement of engineering, geology, operations, accounting, administration, and commercial performance across every Joint Operating Committee in which they participate. Generating distinct competitive advantages from minimizing organizational latency. 

Perhaps the most important realization, however, is that every major architectural component within Synallagi exists to accomplish a single objective.

To reduce organizational latency.

Throughout this series we have discussed Artificial Intelligence, the Marketplace Modules, the Business Operations Management Module, the Joint Operating Committee, the Material Balance Report, Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration, the Research & Capabilities Module, the Knowledge & Learning Module, Intellectual Property, and digital settlement technologies. At first they appear to be independent concepts. They are not. They form a single organizational architecture whose purpose is to reduce the elapsed time between the availability of actionable information and the execution of profitable governed commercial action.

For more than a century, competitive advantage in oil & gas has been measured by reserves, production, drilling technology, engineering capability, geological opportunity, and access to capital. Those capabilities remain essential, but they are no longer sufficient.

• The next generation of competitive advantage will be determined by organizational speed.
• How quickly can new information become an operating decision?
• How quickly can engineering discoveries become operating practice?
• How quickly can hypotheses become profitable production?
• How quickly can geological insight become profitable production?
• How quickly can financial information influence operational decisions rather than merely report historical corporate performance?

Organizations that answer these questions more effectively than their competitors will increasingly define the future of North American oil & gas. In contrast, evaluate how today’s producers perform. The question is therefore no longer whether Artificial Intelligence will influence the industry. It undoubtedly will. The real question is whether organizations possess the architecture necessary to employ Artificial Intelligence effectively. Information without organization merely accelerates confusion. Information governed through organizational architecture accelerates profitable decision-making.

This is why Synallagi transfers the continuous development of organizational capability from isolated producer organizations to our user community and their service provider organizations. Knowledge is no longer confined within one producer, one department, or one property. Innovation no longer disappears when individuals retire or organizations reorganize. Instead, knowledge becomes Intellectual Property. Intellectual Property becomes organizational capability. Organizational capability becomes governed commercial practice. Artificial Intelligence then scales those capabilities across every participating Joint Operating Committee. It also reinforces why eliminating organizational latency matters: speed without governance is chaos; speed with governance becomes competitive advantage.

Innovation therefore becomes an Organizational Construct rather than an isolated event.

This represents a fundamental departure from the way the industry has traditionally organized itself. Financial reporting will continue to describe historical performance for external stakeholders. Management accounting will increasingly determine future operating decisions. Scientific capability will be measured not by activity, but by the profitability it creates. Organizational performance will increasingly be measured not by the amount of work completed, but by the time required to transform information into governed commercial action. That is a different way of thinking about the industry.

An industry that has spent decades depleting one of the greatest endowments of natural wealth in history through organizational inefficiency now has the opportunity to reconstruct itself upon an entirely different foundation. The reserves remain. The physical infrastructure remains. The scientific talent remains. What has been missing is the organizational architecture capable of combining these assets into a continuously profitable enterprise. The opportunity before us is therefore not simply to modernize North American oil & gas, but to reconstruct it.

If that proposition proves correct, Synallagi represents more than a software platform, more than an Enterprise Resource Planning system, and more than a marketplace.

It represents a new discipline.

A discipline that unifies organizational economics, marketplace design, engineering, geology, accounting, Enterprise Resource Planning, Intellectual Property, and Artificial Intelligence into a single operating architecture whose objective is clear. Competitive advantage comes from minimizing latency, a new discipline. To transform information into governed commercial action with the least possible organizational latency.

That is the future we believe North American oil & gas is capable of achieving.

That is Synallagi.

A New Discipline.

Please see Section 1 of “21st Century Marketplace Vision - Service Providers Vision - Section 1”

21st Century Marketplace Service Providers Sec 2 - Part XXXVII

Producers Continued

Producers’ Enterprise Resource Planning / Artificial Intelligence Issue  

Corporate leadership is increasingly focused on the competitive implications of Artificial Intelligence across their organizations and industries. The issue is not limited to what executives know they do not know. The greater risk lies in what they do not know they do not know. That risk is compounded by the difficulty of institutional change. As Niccolo Machiavelli, 1469-1527 stated, “It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.”

This paper addresses the structural and strategic implications of Artificial Intelligence for Enterprise Resource Planning and explains why these developments now require board-level attention beyond the digital initiatives producers have previously imposed across their organizations. The matter is no longer one of incremental technology adoption. It is a question of whether producer firms each have the organizational structure, data discipline, governance capacity, and operating model necessary to remain competitive.

The 2025 Oracle Artificial Intelligence Conference served as the catalyst for this analysis. The architectural and product changes introduced across Oracle’s portfolio were substantive and directionally aligned with the evolution of Synallagi for oil & gas. Those engaged in the work of People, Ideas & Objects, our user community, and their service provider organizations are strongly encouraged to review the full conference proceedings. Oracle’s platform-level integration of data, workflow, analytics, automation, and Artificial Intelligence signals a structural inflection point in Enterprise Resource Planning. The coherence of that direction is material to the future of Synallagi and to the future configuration of oil & gas accounting, administration, and operations. (YouTube videos here, here, here, here and here.)

Oracle remains at the forefront of database and Enterprise Resource Planning software. However, Oracle is one participant within a broader technology ecosystem that is advancing rapidly and, in many respects, nonlinearly. What is emerging is not a collection of isolated tools. It is an integrated stack of capabilities whose aggregate implications for oil & gas corporate officers and directors are material and potentially damaging if misunderstood, delayed, or mismanaged.

A defining characteristic of these technologies is their architectural depth and systemic complexity. In retrospect, the personal computer and the Internet appear comparatively simple. Both benefited from decades of assimilation. The current wave will not provide the same adoption timeline. Producers may have only a limited window, measured in years rather than decades, to respond effectively. The cost of inaction will not be abstract. It will appear as operational obsolescence, competitive erosion, stranded organizational capability, and declining access to capital.

These developments are layered over an Information Technology infrastructure whose implications are far more consequential than anything producers have previously experienced. For producer firms with hundreds or thousands of employees, the question is not whether a new tool can be adopted. The question is whether the organization can be brought through a new operating model without losing coherence, control, accountability, or competitiveness. Will all personnel willingly take that step with existing leadership, existing systems, and existing business processes?

This paper identifies the relevant technological shifts, outlines how they can be implemented within Oracle’s Enterprise Resource Planning environment, and defines how Synallagi software and associated services will be delivered to North American oil & gas producers. It also articulates the operational, financial, governance, and competitive benefits of this integration.

North American oil & gas producers require organizational structures and industry configurations that support disciplined, efficient, accountable, and profitable operations. It is increasingly evident that the prevailing producer business model has exhausted its effectiveness. Synallagi is structurally aligned with the organizational forms necessary to optimize these technologies. Its design anticipated the convergence of data architecture, automation, analytics, marketplaces, and Artificial Intelligence. For Synallagi, therefore, this integration is evolutionary rather than disruptive.

Each technological and organizational development will be examined individually and then synthesized into a coherent enterprise-level vision. None of these technologies is entirely novel in isolation. What is consequential is the depth of Synallagi' integration, the strategic clarity of implementation, and the opportunity for corporate leadership to reposition their organizations for sustained competitiveness in global capital markets.

The central issue is straightforward. Artificial Intelligence will not rescue a defective organization. It will amplify the quality, discipline, and accountability of the structure into which it is deployed. For North American oil & gas producers, the strategic choice is whether Artificial Intelligence becomes another layer of complexity imposed on an exhausted business model, or whether it is implemented through Synallagi as part of a new culture of reserves preservation, performance, and profitability. The observations of Andrew McAfee from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology regarding how Artificial Intelligence widens professional differentiation are equally applicable to corporate structures: those organizations possessing the greatest inherent health and architectural discipline will be positioned to capture the most significant competitive gains. 

A Vision for Standardized, Objective Accounting  

For People, Ideas & Objects, the implementation of standardized, objective accounting across every Joint Operating Committee establishes a structural advantage for producers and for the broader North American oil & gas industry. Uniform accounting and reporting protocols applied consistently to all Joint Operating Committees create comparability at the property level. That comparability is the precondition for any credible securitization or tokenization of producing properties using distributed ledger infrastructure such as Solana.

Under this model, investors could participate directly at the asset level through ownership of a defined, proportionate interest in a specific producing property. Financial statements prepared for each property, in accordance with recognized standards such as Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, would allow investors to benchmark that property against any other North American investment opportunity. Competing effectively for capital in North American capital markets requires objective metrics, disciplined governance, transparent accountability, and financial statements that are reliable, comparable, and consistently prepared. Standardized accounting is foundational to that objective.

Securitization in this context represents a structural transformation. Ownership of a tokenized interest would correspond to a proportionate share of the property’s title. The producer firm would no longer rely solely on traditional publicly traded equity in the conventional corporate sense. Established common law principles governing title prevent duplicate conveyance of the same property interest, thereby reinforcing the integrity of ownership. Ownership of the asset would be represented in the investors crypto wallet. Demand for this structure is expected to arise from producer firms seeking clearer regulatory alignment within digital asset frameworks, and from investors seeking direct asset-level exposure rather than indirect corporate-level exposure.

A more significant opportunity emerges beyond the liquidity of tokenized ownership. Through Synallagi, the holder of a tokenized oil & gas property interest is no longer required to possess the engineering, geological, operational, accounting or administrative capabilities traditionally associated with producer organizations. Ownership of the asset remains with the investor, while the expertise necessary to preserve reserves, optimize production performance and maximize profitability is provided through the organizational structures that already govern North American oil & gas operations.

The centrepiece of that architecture is the Joint Operating Committee. For decades, the Joint Operating Committee has served as the industry’s primary exploration and production organization. It provides the legal authority, financial oversight, operational decision-making, engineering and geological coordination, communication channels, strategic direction, innovation framework and commercial relationships through which producing properties are developed and managed. Rather than creating a new institution, Synallagi elevates and extends an existing one.

Synallagi transfers the compliance, governance and administrative framework traditionally concentrated within individual producer organizations into alignment with the Joint Operating Committee seven frameworks, where those responsibilities naturally align with the operational management of the property itself. Supported by our user community and their service provider organizations, the Joint Operating Committee becomes a comprehensive organizational framework capable of governing the complete lifecycle of a producing asset through Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration.

The result is that investors are free to own oil & gas properties directly through tokenized interests while relying upon the established engineering, geological, operational and administrative capabilities of the Joint Operating Committee. Ownership, governance and operations are no longer inseparable functions of a producer organization. They become coordinated responsibilities within a common institutional framework that preserves accountability, maintains operational excellence and enables the efficient participation of both traditional and entirely new classes of investors.

Readers need to understand how an outside investor, who chooses to hold the oil & gas crypto asset in their wallet, may or may not have the wherewithal or desire to manage the oil & gas asset. How then would they be expected to participate in the management of their investment? This is the question our user community and service providers of these 21st Century Marketplace Vision papers need to ask themselves and determine how they’ll configure Synallagi to achieve that on behalf of the crypto owners. The benefits of asset securitization through crypto are extensive and beyond the scope of this paper. Liquidity in terms of a direct, long term investment in oil & gas assets is just the beginning. 

Production Discipline  

Standardized accounting is even more critical within the Decentralized Production Model and its price maker strategy. When a well or property becomes unprofitable, the economically rational response is to curtail production, preserve reserves, and redeploy capital only when profitability thresholds are restored. That decision requires confidence that profitability is measured against the same objective standards applied to every other producing property in North America. Without that confidence, production discipline will fail.

Synallagi is configured to deliver standardized Enterprise Resource Planning reporting, informed during development by our user community and supported through accounting preparation by their service provider organizations. The result is continent-wide consistency in performance evaluation. All operations are assessed against identical profitability criteria, while still preserving the property-specific detail necessary to understand the technical, commercial, and accounting realities of each Joint Operating Committee.

Equally important is structural independence. Our user community and their service providers operate without direct influence from any dominant producer. If the underlying software architecture were derived from the internal systems of a major integrated producer, broader industry adoption would be constrained by perceived bias. Synallagi is built on Oracle Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning infrastructure, reflecting cross-industry best practices rather than the internal preferences of any single oil & gas firm. Producers influence system evolution indirectly through structured interaction with our user community, not through unilateral control.

From a transactional efficiency perspective, distributed ledger infrastructure is economically viable. For example, fixed transaction fees on Solana are commonly cited as approximately $0.000005 per transaction, no matter the size of the transaction's value. At that rate, transaction infrastructure costs are negligible relative to institutional or banking transaction values and interest costs. The economic implication is straightforward: distributed ledger infrastructure can scale to institutional capital requirements without transaction fees becoming a material barrier to adoption. Service providers would have fees involved in the manual aspects of a transaction such as checking title, coordinating legal and audit services for crypto, which would have their own fees or costs.

Standardized financial accounting therefore provides producers with the foundation required to participate credibly in crypto exchange markets and digital asset structures. As Professor Langlois notes, innovation is enhanced when it is distributed across the market. In this instance, the relevant market is the accounting and administrative market of North American oil & gas, an area where innovation has not historically been treated as a necessity. 

That condition can no longer continue. Creative accounting aside, management accounting in oil & gas is materially underdeveloped. A scientific business such as oil & gas requires its own management accounting protocols, designed around reserves preservation, performance, profitability, production discipline, and well and property-level accountability. Our user community and their service provider organizations are structured to enable these developments. Dynamic innovation in management accounting should be welcomed, provided it does not compromise the integrity, objectivity, or comparability of financial reporting. 

Standardization also establishes a consistent knowledge base across the industry. When oil & gas personnel, producers, investors, service providers, accountants, administrators, engineers, and geologists are familiar with Synallagi, its processes, its procedures, our user community, and the role of service provider organizations, a common operating understanding emerges. This shared knowledge base reduces friction, accelerates adoption, improves training, and supports accountability across producer firms and Joint Operating Committees.

Industry acceptance of an objective method of accounting is necessary for several reasons. First, every producer must have the ability to put its case forward to the appropriate member of our user community. That does not assure adoption of the producer’s preferred method as the objective industry-wide methodology. It means the argument can be assessed within a structured, independent, and accountable process.

Second, production allocations are an artful interpretation of science. Synallagi Material Balance Report captures the nuance and dynamic nature of each Joint Operating Committee’s operational outcome. This cannot be fully standardized in the same manner as a chart of accounts or financial statement format. It can only be objective in relation to the specific property, its facts, its technical configuration, its production history, and its defined and agreed allocation methodology. Production allocations are subject to interpretation. Although the accounts, Material Balance Report, and related reporting structures will be standardized, each property’s configuration cannot be identical.

The objective nature of reporting is essential to the assessment of property profitability. If accounting valuation in the Permian is prepared on a different basis than accounting valuation in the Marcellus, producers operating in the Marcellus will not accept the reporting as objective when curtailment decisions are required. Production discipline depends on trust in the accounting method. Without consistent standards, a producer asked to shut in unprofitable production will argue the measurement basis rather than accept the economic reality.

The standardized and objective methods used by Synallagi are independent and not controlled by any single individual, producer, basin, or financial interest. Each member of our user community and their service provider organization influences only a defined portion of the accounting system. They have no practical means to benefit one field over another, one producer over another, or one operating strategy over another. Our user community are not “blind sleepwalking agents of whomever will feed them.” Their independence is a structural requirement of a dynamic, innovative, accountable, and profitable oil & gas industry.

Therefore, Synallagi provides a dynamic and adaptable system capable of responding to changes in the marketplace while preserving standardized and objective accounting and accountability. It will remain consistent with reporting regulations, producer requirements, financial market expectations, and operational reality on the ground. Applying these principles and methods across the industry is the only fair and reasonable basis on which producers can rebuild trust, regain the confidence of the investment community, and compete effectively in North American capital markets.

21st Century Marketplace Service Providers Sec 2 - Part XXXVI

Producers Continued

People, Ideas & Objects Capacities & Capabilities  

The vision set out in this paper is not short-term. It reasonably extends Synallagi through 2045–2055. That is intentional. Durable architecture requires long horizons. A long horizon aligns incentives, protects participants’ interests, and signals seriousness of purpose to those considering engagement.

Technology evolves incrementally. Each generation builds upon the prior one. Implementation is cumulative and often additive in effect, yet occasionally transformative in impact. A practical example is the integration of SpaceX’s EchoStar cellular satellite network for the Internet of Things–enabled field data capture of production volumes. This eliminates the need for costly, fragmented, ground-based internet infrastructure in remote locations—an approach that would otherwise require decades of groundwork deployment and capital inefficiency.

Without Synallagi, each producer would be forced to assemble these technologies independently—replicating the same scope of functionality, highly specialized IT capabilities, governance, integration, and process management on fragmented corporate IT budgets. Each would compete for limited Information Technology resources in the labor market. Each would duplicate effort. None would be licensed for the use of People, Ideas & Objects Intellectual Property embedded in Synallagi. Nor would they benefit from any shared Intellectual Property developed across the producer population. 

The aggregate outcome would be predictable: redundancy, inefficiency, maintenance burdens, and capital waste at scale for a non-competitive administrative and accounting capability.

The structural reality is clear. No producer is an island. The increasing integration required among Joint Operating Committee participants demands coordinated technological architecture. Information Technology capacities and capabilities must now extend beyond the reach of even the largest standalone producer. Will producers be constrained by their partners' Information Technology capabilities?

Hardware is no longer the constraint. Cloud infrastructure has commoditized access to computing power. Software architecture is the binding constraint—and it is becoming more complex, not less. Accordingly, software development, implementation and maintenance must follow the same shared, cloud-based economic principles as infrastructure. As a variable cost based on usage.

Synallagi operates within accounting and administration—domains that have historically not been considered competitive advantages for producers. That assumption is no longer totally defensible. In a capital-intensive industry competing in dynamic North American markets, Information Technology capabilities in accounting and administration are rapidly evolving from back-office utilities into competitive necessities.

The future demands access to shared architecture, disciplined accountability and governance, and scalable design. People, Ideas & Objects Marketplace Vision as captured in Synallagi exists to deliver precisely that.

A Vision of the Oil & Gas Producers Working Environment  

The working environment of the future is fundamentally different from the administrative and operational systems that exist today. Synallagi establishes two permanent operational environments that continuously support every producer, engineer, geologist, accountant, administrator, service provider organization, and Artificial Intelligence capability operating within the North American oil & gas industry.

The first is the Marketplace Interface, the commercial environment through which organizations discover opportunities, negotiate Synallagi transactions with the service industry, collaborate with our user community, engage service provider organizations, and coordinate the activities that preserve reserves, improve performance, and increase profitability. Through this common operating environment, the Petroleum Lease Marketplace, Resource Marketplace, and Financial Marketplace function as an integrated commercial ecosystem where assets, the service industry, specialized resources, professional services, field service resources, capital, knowledge, and opportunities flow continuously between participants. Every significant commercial activity within Synallagi originates, interacts with, or is completed through one or more of these Marketplace Modules, making the Marketplace Interface the primary environment in which North American oil & gas organizations conduct business.

Business Operations Management Vision  

Business Operations Management is not simply an operational module. It is the commercial decision-making environment through which producers continually evaluate the economic performance of every property, facility, project, and investment under their responsibility.

Engineers and geologists can no longer focus exclusively on production performance or reserve development. Every technical decision is evaluated alongside its financial, commercial, and organizational consequences. Operational excellence and commercial performance become inseparable, allowing technical expertise to be measured by the economic value it creates.

When a property or individual well becomes unprofitable and is shut in, Business Operations Management becomes the environment in which recovery strategies are developed, evaluated, authorized, and executed. Rather than relying solely upon engineering judgement or experience, engineers and geologists construct multiple pro forma financial scenarios using the property’s actual historical accounting records at the well level as the analytical foundation. Historical production volumes, operating expenses, capital expenditures, maintenance costs, revenues, decline curves, and financial performance are projected forward to evaluate the economic consequences of proposed production increases, cost reductions, capital improvements, operational efficiencies, or alternative development strategies before financial commitments are made.

A property consisting of twenty-five wells may appear to be unprofitable when viewed as a single operating unit. However, financial analysis at the individual well level may reveal that only two wells, because of an obscure operational or economic condition, are destroying the profitability of the remaining twenty-three. In that circumstance, shutting in the entire property would be extreme, while shutting in only the two uneconomic wells becomes the rational commercial decision. The challenge with today’s systems is that this level of financial granularity does not exist. Engineering and production data are often available at the well level, but the corresponding accounting and financial information is aggregated at the property, field or higher level, forcing producers to make engineering decisions without a complete understanding of the underlying economics, which can be different and are dynamic, based on unseen business decisions. Synallagi is designed to integrate operational and financial information at the level of the individual well, allowing producers, engineers, geologists, accountants, and Artificial Intelligence to identify these anomalies, evaluate alternative remediation strategies through pro forma financial analysis, and execute the course of action most likely to restore the property’s overall profitability.

The objective is not simply to return a property to production. The objective is to determine which combination of engineering, operational, financial, and commercial decisions is most likely to restore sustainable profitability while preserving reserves, improving operational performance, and strengthening long-term enterprise value. That will be the redefined job description of oil & gas scientists.

Every successful remediation, every unsuccessful attempt, and every innovative operating practice represents intellectual capital that should not be lost. Through the Research & Capabilities and the Knowledge & Learning Module, Synallagi enables the producer to capture these developments, validates them through operational experience, refines them through continuous testing, and deploys improvements throughout the producer’s organization and contribute to the development of their producer firms engineering and geological capacities and capabilities competitive advantage. Innovation therefore becomes a persistent organizational capability rather than an isolated individual achievement.

The result is that organizations no longer repeat the same investigations, rediscover the same solutions, or incur the same costs simply because institutional knowledge has been forgotten over time. Instead, every implementation strengthens the collective knowledge of the enterprise, allowing each subsequent investment decision to begin where the previous one concluded.

Business Operations Management therefore evolves beyond an operational reporting system into a continuously learning commercial platform where engineering expertise, financial analysis, organizational knowledge, and Artificial Intelligence combine to improve every future investment decision. Innovation is no longer episodic. It becomes an institutional process that continually compounds the commercial capabilities of producers, service provider organizations, and the North American oil & gas industry as a whole.

Engineers & Geologists  

We have identified the scientific resources of producer organizations and the Joint Operating Committee as the primary users of Synallagi. The objective is not simply to provide engineers and geologists with additional information, but to provide them with the financial, operational, and commercial intelligence necessary to improve decision making throughout the lifecycle of every property, project, and investment.

Business Operations Management integrates engineering, geological, operational, and accounting information into a common decision-making environment where technical expertise is evaluated alongside commercial performance. Information is available at a level of detail and financial granularity that supports both ad hoc investigation and pro forma financial analysis using the actual historical accounting records of individual properties and wells. Rather than relying upon assumptions derived from aggregated financial information, engineers and geologists can objectively evaluate how proposed production increases, cost reductions, capital investments, operational improvements, or alternative development strategies are likely to influence future profitability before financial commitments are made.

This raises a more fundamental question.

Who does the engineer or geologist ultimately work for?

Traditionally, the answer has been straightforward: the producer organization that provides employment. Within Synallagi, however, scientific expertise becomes visible to the broader marketplace. Engineers and geologists develop specialized knowledge through years of experience operating particular reservoirs, geological formations, production methods, completion techniques, and recovery strategies. Those capabilities frequently extend well beyond the needs of a single producer.

Members of the Joint Operating Committee, other producer organizations, and service provider organizations may all operate properties with similar geological characteristics or operational challenges. Through the Marketplace Interface and Business Operations Management, those organizations gain the ability to identify scientific expertise based not upon resumes or professional networks, but upon demonstrated commercial outcomes and objectively measured performance.

The competitive advantage therefore shifts from experience alone to demonstrated value creation.

Synallagi objectively measures the financial benefits generated by engineering and geological innovations using the Targeting Framework. By removing proprietary producer information while preserving the measurable commercial outcomes, improvements can be evaluated, certified, and attributed to the individuals and organizations responsible for creating them. Engineers and geologists therefore develop professional reputations based upon independently verified improvements in reserves preservation, performance, and profitability rather than subjective opinion or organizational hierarchy.

The result is a marketplace in which scientific expertise becomes increasingly portable. Opportunities are created because the value of an individual’s contributions can be demonstrated objectively, allowing specialized knowledge to benefit multiple producers and Joint Operating Committees while creating broader career opportunities for the scientific community.

This evolution extends beyond individual expertise.

Every successful innovation, whether developed by an engineer, geologist, producer organization, or service provider organization, becomes a candidate for institutional learning. Through the Research & Capabilities Module and the Knowledge & Learning Module, Synallagi captures new ideas, validates them through operational performance, refines them through continuous testing, and deploys proven practices throughout the organization. Innovation therefore becomes an Organizational Construct that systematically transforms individual discoveries into enduring organizational capabilities. Organizations no longer repeat the same investigations, rediscover forgotten solutions, or incur unnecessary costs because valuable knowledge has been lost over time.

Engineers and geologists are not expected to become experts in Synallagi itself. Through Synnefa.ai, producer organizations are supported by a specialized network of service provider organizations that administer, configure, maintain, and continuously improve the platform while assisting scientific resources in applying its capabilities to their day-to-day work. These service provider organizations combine accounting, administrative, technical, operational, and Artificial Intelligence expertise with the producers’ engineering and geological knowledge, allowing scientific professionals to concentrate on solving reservoir, production, and development challenges while Synallagi delivers the commercial, financial, and organizational intelligence necessary to support informed decision making.

For many scientific professionals, Intellectual Property will become the most valuable asset they create. As Artificial Intelligence assumes responsibility for increasingly routine analytical work, competitive advantage shifts toward proprietary methods, specialized knowledge, unique workflows, and validated innovations that Artificial Intelligence can amplify throughout the enterprise. As People, Ideas & Objects has observed:

“Artificial Intelligence is the killer application for Intellectual Property.”

The significance of this statement is realized when Intellectual Property is no longer viewed as documentation, but as an operational asset that Artificial Intelligence can execute, refine, and scale throughout an organization.

Recent observations from Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reinforce this direction. He argues that lower-cost Artificial Intelligence will not reduce competitive differences between organizations; instead, it will widen them because stronger organizations are better positioned to combine software, organizational capability, and specialized expertise. Early evidence also suggests that Artificial Intelligence reduces the effort spent on routine coordination while allowing highly skilled professionals to devote more time to exploration, innovation, and solving increasingly complex problems.

The question therefore is no longer whether Artificial Intelligence will influence the future of engineering and geology.

The question is which future the oil & gas scientist intends to help build.

A New Discipline  

The observation that Synallagi represents an entire new discipline extends beyond the development of innovative software. A software application solves a problem. A discipline establishes a body of knowledge that others can study, apply, refine, and extend over time.

As the Marketplace Vision papers have evolved, the individual concepts have begun to reveal themselves as parts of a coherent organizational framework rather than independent software capabilities. The Marketplace Modules, Business Operations Management, Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration, Organizational Constructs, Research & Capabilities and Knowledge & Learning Module, Targeting Framework, Intellectual Property, and Artificial Intelligence no longer operate as separate ideas. Together they describe how organizations can be designed to continuously improve their commercial, operational, and financial performance.

This distinction is important. The objective of Synallagi has never been simply to automate existing business processes. It is to redefine how knowledge is created, validated, preserved, shared, and transformed into enduring organizational capability. Innovation becomes an Organizational Construct. Knowledge becomes a strategic asset. Organizational memory becomes a competitive advantage. Artificial Intelligence becomes the mechanism through which these capabilities are scaled throughout the enterprise.

Viewed collectively, these principles begin to define more than an Enterprise Resource Planning system. They establish a systematic approach to organizational design for the Artificial Intelligence era, where every Organizational Construct, Marketplace Module, business process, and Synallagi transaction contributes toward the common objective of creating sustainable commercial value.

21st Century Marketplace Service Providers Sec 2 - Part XXXV

Producers  

The reconstruction of the North American oil & gas industry begins with a fundamental reconsideration of the producer firm itself. Central to this transformation is the establishment of the Joint Operating Committee as the industry’s primary Organizational Construct, complemented by elevating the Markets Organizational Construct to a position equal in strategic importance to the producer organization. Together, these Organizational Constructs redefine how producers participate in exploration, production, capital allocation, innovation, and competition.

At first glance, it may appear that People, Ideas & Objects, through Synallagi, our user community, and their service provider organizations, seeks to diminish the role of the producer firm. The opposite is true. Our objective is to strengthen the producer by removing the structural constraints that have limited its ability to compete. What is being displaced is not the producer itself, but the hierarchical bureaucracy that has dominated the industry for decades and increasingly become an impediment to performance, innovation, accountability, and profitability.

People, Ideas & Objects redefines the producer firm by reconstructing its administrative, accounting, operational, and governance foundations. This represents the natural progression of the specialization and division of labor that has reshaped every major industry. Administrative and accounting functions evolve from isolated internal activities into specialized capabilities delivered through our user community and their service provider organizations. The producer, in turn, becomes more agile, more innovative, and better equipped to concentrate on its primary responsibilities of exploration, development, and profitable production.

For more than half a century, North American oil & gas has operated within organizational structures that rewarded activity more consistently than performance. Capital deployment gradually became the industry’s principal competitive mechanism, while profitability, accountability, and organizational learning became secondary considerations. Over time, this produced a culture that accepted “muddle through” as an operating philosophy rather than treating sustained profitability as the defining measure of success.

The consequences of that organizational design are now evident. Large segments of the industry continue to consume capital in order to produce, while lacking the information, organizational structures, and decision-making frameworks necessary to consistently identify where value is created, where it is destroyed, and how performance can be systematically improved. Organizational inertia has replaced organizational adaptation, leaving many producers culturally committed to methods that have repeatedly failed to restore competitive performance.

This persistence cannot reasonably be attributed to a lack of opportunity. Since publication of the Preliminary Specification (now Synallagi) in August 2012, the industry has experienced repeated opportunities to reconsider its administrative and organizational foundations. During the same period, investors steadily withdrew their confidence from producer firms whose financial performance and accountability failed to improve. Yet the underlying organizational structures have remained largely unchanged.

The purpose of this section is therefore not to criticize existing producers, but to define a new organizational model for those to institute a culture of reserves preservation, performance and profitability. We examine what a producer becomes when markets, the Joint Operating Committee, Artificial Intelligence, specialized service providers, and modern Enterprise Resource Planning architecture are integrated into a coherent organizational framework. In doing so, we describe not only how producer firms can be reconstructed, but how a new generation of industry leaders can emerge to rebuild North American oil & gas upon the enduring principles of resource preservation, performance, and profitability.

In many respects, this represents A New Discipline. It is a discipline that treats organizational design as a competitive advantage, recognizes markets as active organizational participants rather than external forces, and positions profitability as the outcome of superior organizational architecture rather than simply higher commodity prices or greater capital expenditure.

A Vision for Service Providers Leadership  

People, Ideas & Objects’ vision for leadership in oil and gas will be demonstrated through our user community and their service provider organizations. Together, they will provide the business, accounting, administrative, operational and software leadership required to rebuild the industry around reserves preservation, performance and profitability.

Oil and gas now finds itself locked into an organizational configuration that is no longer adequate to serve the majority of its needs. Time, resources and people are being deployed, employed and consumed without creating commensurate value. People, Ideas & Objects have described this as a modern software bug. The Enterprise Resource Planning system that should enable the organization has instead become one of its largest constraints.

Producer officers and directors appear to have learned that if they do not upgrade their Enterprise Resource Planning systems, then their status quo cannot be challenged. This has created a static environment of systems atrophy, manual workarounds and declining accountability. Rather than functioning as an operating platform for performance and profitability, legacy ERP software has become a defensive mechanism for organizational inertia.

This static Enterprise Resource Planning environment has persisted in oil and gas throughout this century, and possibly for a decade before. Oracle abandoned the effort to convince producers of the need for meaningful upgrades in 2000. IBM did so in 2005. This leaves People, Ideas & Objects’ Synallagi as the only comprehensive proposed development now being undertaken for the oil and gas industry. Since 2003, our principal reward has been the hostility of producer officers and directors whose methods and means of operation were being challenged.

The demands placed on the industry will be insatiable and among the most difficult in its history. An organizational structure inherited from a bygone era will no longer be adequate. Information Technology offers new ways to organize work, with the most significant change arising from the enhanced communication capabilities of the Internet. As the Internet of Information transitions to the Internet of Value, materially greater levels of change will be implemented over materially shorter periods of time.

The difference this time is that the required changes are not experimental. They are no longer being introduced on a trial basis, as optional technological initiatives, or as speculative improvements. They are being demanded by market realities and operational necessity. Ignoring the Internet of Value will impose significant costs on any individual or organization that chooses to remain outside its development.

The dynamic nature of these Information Technologies, combined with the changing requirements of oil and gas, will create a highly interactive operating environment. People, Ideas & Objects have always believed this would be the case. Accordingly, we have built our organization around continuous development and continuous delivery to satisfy the evolving needs of oil and gas. This principle defines not only People, Ideas & Objects, but also our user community and their service provider configurations.

Oracle Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning has demonstrated that an Enterprise Resource Planning system can operate on a quarterly upgrade cycle. Oracle has also demonstrated a quarterly financial reporting cadence in which reporting can be completed within six working days. People, Ideas & Objects’ Synallagi will bring this software discipline, upgrade cadence and reporting expectation into oil and gas.

Through this design and configuration, Synallagi will lead the oil and gas industry not only in optimal performance and profitability, but also in the organizational structural changes necessary to keep producers dynamic, innovative, accountable and profitable. The objective should be stated clearly. People, Ideas & Objects, our user community and their service provider organizations are working to ensure that the oil and gas industry never again finds itself trapped in the type of constrained organizational structure it occupies today.

In a previous paper, 21st Century Marketplace Vision — Part II: Our User Community, we detailed the compensation model for both our user community and their service provider organizations. That discussion included Enterprise Resource Planning Implementation Revenues, Maintenance and Support Revenues, and Dynamic Value Revenues earned by our user community and their service provider organizations. Dynamic Value Revenues are the mechanisms that maintain the commercial alignment of our user community and their service providers with the value and profitability earned by producer firms.

We have seen what occurs when a primary industry such as oil and gas operates without adequate profitability. The consequences are not confined to producer firms. They flow through the broader oil and gas economic infrastructure and impair every participant dependent on the revenues generated from the sale of oil and gas. Profitability is the only durable source of funding available to sustain the industry. There are no alternative revenue streams capable of supporting the service sector, the subsequent tiers of industry, or the producer firms themselves.

McKinsey recently advanced an argument that is consistent with People, Ideas & Objects’ prior discussion regarding the natural gas loss calculation. Value has been seeping out of the industry through the “muddle through” and indifferent approach of producer firm officers and directors. People, Ideas & Objects calculated that approximately $5.0 trillion in value has been lost this century as a result of their unwillingness or inability to manage the business. That calculation was based on the deterioration of the pricing structure of natural gas relative to oil on a heating value basis. Historically, natural gas traded at approximately a 6:1 ratio against oil, reflecting its equivalent heating value. In 2024, that relationship deteriorated to levels as extreme as 52.5:1, with today’s factor being 31:0.

People, Ideas & Objects attributes this value destruction to the industry’s failure to transition from a business model based on resource scarcity to one based on the abundance made possible by shale. Chronic overproduction of oil & natural gas has destroyed industry value and will require substantial remediation to correct. Meanwhile, the value that should have accrued to the industry, its investors, its service industry, and its broader economic infrastructure has instead been captured as consumer discounts or by downstream and adjacent firms marketing the product at full value.

McKinsey states:

Oil and gas production in the United States has outpaced the infrastructure needed to get products to market, increasing the premium for those who control these flows. This is especially true for gas, due to the large interconnected global market for liquefied natural gas, and exacerbated by the global data center industry increasingly looking to gas as a source of energy.

McKinsey also notes:

Operators are therefore seeking more control over paths to market, both to protect their access and to capture the arbitrage of price dislocations that have become more frequent as volatility grows. The increase in midstream consolidation, with $180 billion worth of deals in the last three years, speaks to this trend, as midstream organizations rush to maximize their share of this value pool.

McKinsey’s $180 billion assessment appears consistent with the theme of People, Ideas & Objects’ $5.0 trillion assessment for the 21st century and currently over $30 billion / month, although it is not as comprehensive in scope and does not address the full twenty-five-year period. One critical area is Permian associated gas, which is often treated by oil producers as a byproduct rather than as a primary source of value. 

The practice of producer firms retaining cash for internal priorities, executive compensation, and balance sheet optics while leaving insufficient value to sustain the remainder of the industry is not a durable operating model. Prior to 2015, producer performance had deteriorated to the point where annual external capital was required merely to maintain operations. The difference today is decisive. That annual infusion of capital is no longer available. Profitability must now be generated internally, and it must be generated with the recognition that the industry’s economic requirements extend well beyond the producer firm.

The service industry, and every subsequent tier of the oil and gas economy, is as dependent on oil and gas revenues as the producers themselves. Their employees, investors, suppliers, contractors, and communities are no less dependent on those revenues than producer employees are dependent on their paychecks. A producer firm does not operate in isolation. It operates through a continental economic structure that must remain profitable, capable, and investable if producers themselves are to continue functioning.

The value of oil and gas production will be realized somewhere, by someone, at some point in the value chain. Oil & gas as a primary industry has a responsibility to ensure that the producer firm receives its profitable share of that value while also ensuring that the service industry participants upon whom producers depend are profitably sustained. Allowing value created by the service industry, funded by investors, and required by the broader industry, to dissipate downstream after producer officers and directors determine they have been adequately compensated is not management. It is value leakage at continental scale through uncaring incompetence.

When producer investors identify accountability and profitability as the reasons for abandoning their interests, the matter has reached a terminal phase unless the firm acts decisively to remediate those deficiencies. Continued inaction after eleven years does not represent prudence, patience, or strategic restraint. It reflects an unwillingness or inability to confront the conditions investors have already identified as disqualifying. It is a futile debate to discern which is more tragic. That investors were forced to act in 2015. Or that in 2026 this fact does not seem to register on the officers and directors.

This is where the service provider role within Synallagi becomes material. Service providers must evaluate how their services, and the software they deliver through Synallagi, enhance profitability and value across the industry. Acting through the user community member who owns their organization, they must identify the software developments, process changes, and operational innovations required to produce measurable value for the broader oil and gas economy.

Within this structure, our user community’s service providers are not merely vendors. They are the operational agents through which profitability, accountability, and value restoration become executable. Their responsibility is to convert the explicit knowledge embedded in Synallagi into applied commercial performance. That performance is supported by their tacit knowledge, process specialization, and direct engagement with the requirements of producers, Joint Operating Committees, and the broader oil and gas economy.

The user community and their service provider organizations are motivated by mutual monetary benefit. They have a direct economic interest in developing the value-enhancing capabilities the industry requires. Through People, Ideas & Objects’ Targeting Framework, which will be addressed in a future paper in the 21st Century Marketplace Vision series, they will share in the perpetual value generated by these innovations.

To be precise, I have identified several of the larger value failures, including natural gas price losses, failures in realizing Liquefied Natural Gas markets developments to rehabilitate natural gas prices, Permian associated gas being dumped into Henry Hub pricing, and the industry’s limited recognition that shale changed the business model from scarcity to abundance. However, these observations represent only one perspective, and a perspective formed from outside the industry’s daily operations. What those working inside the industry know, identify, and as service providers will be able to change may be equally dramatic and equally value generating for both themselves and producers.

All values identified in these papers will therefore be subject to the Targeting Framework. The resulting value generated will accrue to our user community and their service provider organizations according to the objective evaluation of their contributions. This ensures that innovation is not merely encouraged rhetorically, but compensated structurally, perpetually, and in proportion to the value created. It will also keep score overall in terms of how much value has been generated by Synallagi, our user community and their service provider organizations. 

Synallagi' Targeting Framework objectively evaluates changes proposed and implemented by our user community and service providers. It determines objectively and monetarily how those changes enhance profitability, increase industry value, or improve accountability and performance. It then calculates and distributes the proceeds arising from those improvements.

When service providers conduct process management across all producer firms, even a small innovation can generate material value at industry scale. The service provider’s share may represent only a small percentage of the total industry benefit. However, that share will be perpetual and consistent for as long as the innovation remains operational and continues generating value.

This is the purpose of an objective and independent Targeting Framework: to evaluate, assess, calculate, and distribute the benefits created through innovation, accountability, and improved performance. It converts improvement into compensation, compensation into motivation, and motivation into a durable mechanism for rebuilding profitability across the North American oil and gas economy.