American Oil and Gas Reporter - December 2017 - 90

ConventionCoverage: Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association
Bartlesville newspaper titled, "This is
Not a Day Care; It's a University."
He deplored society's-and especially
academia's-attempts to shelter young
people from things that made them uncomfortable in the name of tolerance.
While everyone is entitled to their own,
Piper said opinions formed a poor foundation for belief.
"Opinions are dangerous," he asserted.
"All the despots of history had opinions.
Those didn't end very well for millions
of people who died at the hand of their
opinions. Opinions always lead to bondage

and slavery. The truth sets us free."
Too often, Piper charged, leaders in
industry and government attempt placate
bad ideas by tolerating them. "You don't
cure cancer with Band-Aids," he insisted.
"To cure cancer you have to stop consuming the carcinogens that cause the
disease.
"What we have in our culture today is
ideological cancer," Piper argued, "to the
point that I have a kid at a Christian
college who is offended by 1 Corinthians
13 and thinks he can throw the victimization card and shut me up."

Piper said he had learned that vision,
message and mission mattered. "Who
are you?" he asked OIPA. "What are
you? What are your values? What are
you doing to control the words that control
the narrative that controls the definitions
that control the emotions? If you aren't
controlling them, somebody else will.
"If you want your companies and your
industry to prevail, then take charge of
your ideas, your mission and your words,"
Piper encouraged. "And then challenge
people when they just simply are wrong."
r

Data Drive Today's Oil & Gas Industry
RIDGEDALE, MO.-In the increasingly
automated world of the digital oil field,
data are the new currency, said one technical speaker at the Oklahoma Independent
Petroleum Association's fall conference,
Nov. 5-7 at Big Cedar Lodge south of
Branson, Mo.
And like money, offered a second
speaker, someone may steal one's data if
he doesn't protect it adequately.
Evan Anderson, co-founder and chief
executive officer of Oseberg in Oklahoma
City, a software-as-a-service and data intelligence company, focused on the challenge of obtaining and making public
data useful, during OIPA's Nov. 6 general
session.
Donovan Farrow, founder and CEO

Public data are neither free nor easily
accessible, Evan Anderson, co-founder
of data intelligence provider Oseberg,
advises the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association's fall conference in
November.

90 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER

of Alias Forensics in Oklahoma City, discussed ways to protect one's data from
hackers.
OIPA's third technical speaker-Ben
Guill, managing partner for private equity
investor White Deer Energy in Houston-
outlined his company's approach to energy
investing.
'Dumpster Fire'
Anderson said staff at Oseberg "affectionately describe public data as a
dumpster fire," adding, "Public data often
are thought of as being freely available,
but there is nothing either free or available
about them."
Furthermore, Anderson said, public
data are difficult to aggregate and analyze.
He noted that companies reported to myriad agencies at the local, state and national
levels. "A lot of the information we want
is off line; a lot of it still is trapped on
microfiche and paper," Anderson pointed
out.
Further, he said, much of the data that
are online exist in a variety of formats
that are not easily accessible or portable.
Anderson offered an example from
Oseberg's hydraulic fracturing dataset.
"We had to process and structure data
from 51,000 pdf-only disclosures from
the FracFocus website to build a truly
competitive dataset," he revealed. "When
cleaning and curating the data, we made
more than 30,000 corrections to ingredient
names. For example, water is represented
by more than 350 ingredient names."
Gaps, inaccuracies and time delays
create further challenges, Anderson reflected. "The amount of work that goes
into cleaning public data is enormous,"
he commented.

Anderson said Oseberg compiled 800
attributes such as operator, formation
name and Pugh clauses across 17 datasets
in three states, performing statistical sampling to find variances and outliers. "We
process 175,000 of those attributes a
month with fewer than five errors," he
proclaimed. "There is a lot of work that
goes into making these data accurate."
Protecting Data
A homeowner who wants to protect
his property may lock the doors, install
an alarm and possibly even a video camera,
mused Alias Forensics' Farrow, who described that as "security layering."
But when it comes to protecting busi-

A single ﬁrewall no more protects a
company's electronic data than a locked
door stops all thieves, warns Donovan
Farrow, founder of Alias Forensics, during
the OIPA fall conference general session
on Nov. 6.

American Oil and Gas Reporter - December 2017

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