Oil authority pays £3m a year for massive North Sea database

The UK authority which oversees North Sea oil fields will pay around £3m a year in upkeep for a new database to help oil companies.

The Oil and Gas Authority launched the UK Oil and Gas National Data Repository late last month in a bid to encourage small explorers to extract as much from the North Sea’s reserves as possible.

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The repository houses 130 terabytes of data, making it one of the biggest open releases in history.

Figures obtained by City A.M. through a freedom of information request shows that the scheme took £543,000 to set up, and will cost around £3m to run each year.

It is unclear how exactly the cost is broken down.

Professor John Underhill, chair of exploration geoscience and chief scientist at Heriot-Watt University told City A.M. the investment is invaluable for scientists understand Britain’s offshore geology. He is also keen to expand the programme onshore

“It is a very good thing that data which is collected by companies is then made publicly available,” he said.

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He said the surveys which are available on the website usually each cost millions of pounds to commission, putting them out of reach to researchers.

At the time it was launched, energy minister Claire Perry said: “The National Data Repository will help position the sector at the front of the data revolution and enable industry to unlock the full potential of the UK continental shelf, delivering further energy security, tax revenues and the high paid jobs that are at the centre of our modern industrial strategy.”