1 - The purpose of the reporting, timetable etc.

1.1 The purpose of the reporting

Pursuant to Section 50a of the Regulations to Act relating to petroleum activities, operating companies shall submit data for use in the revised national budget (RNB):

”The reporting shall include economical company data, projects, resource volumes and prognosis for production, costs and environmental emissions as specified by the recipient”.

Every year within October 15th, all operating companies shall submit data and forecasts for their respective operated fields, discoveries, transportation- and utilization facilities (TUF). Note that the economical company data is not part of the RNB reporting and shall be reported to the Ministry of Energy (MoE) in accordance with their deadlines.

The reporting to the RNB comprises part of the basis for the Government's oil and environmental policies, the fiscal and national budget. These forecasts are important, and great emphasis is therefore placed on ensuring that high-quality reporting is provided within the stated deadlines.

The Norwegian Offshore Directorate (the Directorate) quality-assures and organizes the data reported by the companies. The Directorate also prepares its own estimates and classifies the resources based on its own knowledge and assumptions. Based on this, the Directorate updates the resource account for the Norwegian shelf and prepares overall forecasts. The forecasts are submitted to the MoE and forwarded to the Ministry of Finance.

The forecasts and the resource account are incorporated in several analyses and various publications, such as the “The petroleum resources on the Norwegian continental shelf” and the websites sodir.no and norskpetroleum.no.

The data received will be considered exempted from public disclosure pursuant to Section 13 of the Freedom of Information Act, and to Section 13 of the Public Administration Act, 1st paragraph number 2. Reserves, in-place resources and CAPEX associated to the reserves, are published per field on the Directorate’s web site. Recoverable resources are published per reported discoveries.

1.2 Reporting deadlines/format etc.

Schedule

The Norwegian Offshore Directorate will make the following available to the operators by 1 September:

• Cover letter
• Reporting file
• Guidelines for completing the reporting file for the current RNB

The reporting file can be downloaded from L2S and from the Directorate’s web site. The operators' deadline for submitting the reporting file to the Directorate is 15 October. It is important that you deliver at the deadline, for the Directorate to meet subsequent deadline with the MoE.

The guidelines are provided in English. The reporting file is also in English but contains some Norwegian phrases. There are technical reasons for this, and there is no translation to English in the reporting file. Please contact the Directorate for any questions regarding this.

If there are significant changes to the reporting due to the budgetary processes in the production licenses’ management committees after 15 October, please contact the Directorate as soon as possible to clarify whether there is a need to submit an updated reporting file.

Reporting format

Data shall be reported electronically in accordance with the format given in the reporting file (macro enabled excel file). No changes shall be made in the layout of the spreadsheets, nor can there be any links to other spreadsheets in the file submitted to the Directorate.

The operators are requested to follow the naming of the reporting files as specified in column I in the Project list. The file name must not contain dates or any other information.

1.3 Changes from last year's reporting

There are changes in the Guidelines in the following areas:

• Reporting of project start-up (DG4) has been clarified in chapter 6.3, according to scope-guidelines.
• Information on deposits is no longer available in the reporting file. The list of deposits per reporting object must be taken from Collabor8.
• Project attributes, chapter 6.10, updated to include Scope from Collabor8.
• Serial number is no longer a part of the reporting for projects.

1.4 Quality Assurance and updates from the operators

It is very important that the operator has carried out an internal check to ensure good quality of the data before submission to the Directorate. If the Directorate finds errors, lack of information or ambiguities in the received report, the file will be returned with comments entered in the spreadsheet marked "Tilbakemeldingsskjema" (feedback form). The operator must then submit a new, corrected report or respond to the comments.

The reporting file also contains several functions for quality assurance. For more information, see chapter 9 – Quality Assurance.

1.5 Contact persons

If any questions concerning the reporting, please contact the persons stated below:

The operator must also state a contact person with e-mail address and telephone number in each reporting file.