Backed with the intention of promoting new investments in the oil and gas upstream industry, Indonesia's minister of energy and mineral resources recently enacted a new regulation to replace the 13-year-old regulation on upstream oil and gas data management and utilisation.
Among the highlights in the new regulation is the introduction of access proliferation of declassified upstream petroleum data—the same vision that was set out by the previous regulation but was considered lacking in implementation. Declassification of data would mean that data and information would be more accessible, which, in turn, would lead to an increased control over exploration risks and increased possibility and probability of a discovery.
However, the new regulation is an implementing regulation of Indonesia's oil and gas law and upstream business activities regulation and, consequently, the key regulatory restrictions (and sanctions) on data remain. In fact, the 2019 regulation imposes more obligations on contractors. Further, it gave no definition of "upstream data," and instead tasked the minister to determine the scope of data to be classified as such.
What's New?
Data Center. The Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources has its own data and information technology center. Under the new regulation, it is responsible to establish an upstream data center. This data center is membership-based, although nonmembers can access general data and declassified raw data. Members enjoy additional benefits; they can access declassified processed and interpretative data.
To ensure maximum benefit, the regulation allows one membership to be used by all affiliates of a contractor.
The data centre platform is expected to be live by February 2020.
Declassified Data. Under the new regulation, declassified data consists of any data of an area that has been relinquished by a contractor or for which the confidentiality period has expired.
The confidentiality period of a data would depend on the granularity of the data.