The Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) has set out its commitment to digital services for the UK’s oil and gas industry. According to its Digital Strategy, published today, 19 December 2019, over the next five years the OGA will:

• Continue to build and embed a culture of digital excellence across industry
• Develop and enhance public trust in open and transparent quality data and platforms
• Unlock data value through advanced analytical tools
• Collaborate, partner and assure so services to our key stakeholders continue to improve
• Use its influence to unlock value from data and digitalisation

The strategy describes how the OGA will deliver, promote and influence digital excellence through digitalisation to support MER UK and the energy transition. The initiatives that the OGA plans to implement include:

• An OGA-wide learning and development programme to enhance digital skills, delivering a large internal benefit to the organisation as well as improving services to OGA’s stakeholders.
• The creation of a single easy-to-use OGA digital platform which integrates all the OGA’s digital service offerings and, importantly, is suitable for use in machine learning.
• An enhanced analytics and business intelligence platform to provide deeper insight into data to enhance decision making and solve problems. As part of this the OGA will continue to build dashboards, business intelligence tools, user interfaces and systems of insight from authoritative OGA data sets to provide new analysis and insights.
• The promotion of data, digitalisation and data sharing through industry engagement, professional bodies, communities of practice, agencies, government departments and other ongoing initiatives.

Since it was established in 2015, the OGA has delivered many successful digital initiatives such as launching the UKCS Stewardship Survey, providing a wealth of subsurface data releases to support licensing rounds, and establishing the first UK National Data Repository (NDR), which is being used in over 191 countries.

Simon James, Chief Information Officer at the OGA said: 
“We are enormously ambitious about the impact this strategy can have both within the OGA and across industry. Being the industry’s go-to source for authoritative data has always been a high priority for us but now we can go further by fostering a digitally-enabled culture and providing enhanced user experiences to stakeholders. Data is an enabler of new and disruptive business models, which can lower costs, develop new digital platforms and improve digital experiences.”

KeyFacts Energy Industry Directory: Oil & Gas Authority