Fact box 5.1 - Diskos

Diskos was established by the NPD and the oil companies on the NCS in 1995.

Diskos is owned by the petroleum industry, administered by the NPD and run by an external provider. The contract is renewed at regular intervals pursuant to Norway’s Public Procurement Act.

This is a national repository for exploration- and production-related information from the NCS. Data are directly available on the web to members of the Diskos collaboration. The underlying idea is that the oil companies will join forces on storing information, and compete instead over its interpretation. Since Diskos was created, most players currently active on the NCS have joined.

Storage and administrative costs are paid by the companies through an annual membership fee. All members have access through Diskos to released data, their own information and data owned by production licences they have an interest in. The NPD’s requirements (and associated guidelines) define which format should be used for reporting, the level of quality and so forth.

In recent years, Diskos has also become a data provider to groups other than oil companies, such as oil service firms and consultancies. All universities in Norway and a growing number in the UK and the USA now have access to the repository.

As well as being a solution for joint storage of seismic, well and production data, Diskos provides a platform for swapping and sharing this information. The data can be transferred directly to computers equipped with interpretation tools.

Information can be bought and sold by amending user rights in the repository, and the platform provides a practical solution for publishing data when their period of confidentiality has expired.