Offshore staff
HOUSTON -- IHS Inc. and Energistics have launched a service to deliver an industry standard for global unique well identifiers (GUWI) for all known oil and gas wells outside North America.
The IHS/Energistics GUWI service is the first-ever common method for identifying wells, saving companies time and money when trying to find and match well data from multiple sources based on varying criteria.
The IHS/Energistics Global Unique Well Identifier service consists of three parts. A well registration service provides an IHS GUWI to each new wellbore record, available to IHS clients and non-clients. The well matching service provides the IHS GUWI for companies' existing wellbore records, available to IHS clients and non-clients. the master well index is an IHS proprietary dataset containing the GUWI and associated meta-data for all its U.S., Canadian and international wells, available to IHS clients.
Though IHS has provided unique well identification services since the 1990s, this new service provides a more formal platform available to the whole industry in order to ensure comprehensive global coverage and universal usage.
According to IHS and Energistics, because many wells have multiple naming conventions and different phonetic spellings, oil companies, service companies, governments, and regulatory agencies have trouble with cross-reference information.
The GUWI initiative began in 2003 when Energistics leadership recommended leveraging the worldwide inventory of well identifiers that IHS manages for its customers as the basis for the global well identification standard and making the inventory available industry-wide.
07/07/2008
