The National Hydrocarbon Data Archive will be providing its information from the offshore well and survey information for free through the National Data Repository (NDR).

This information consists of over 4,000 files, which go all the way back to 1978, however most of the files are from the 1980s and 90s. They contain information about wellbores, as well as seismic surveys. Now they have been uploaded to the NDR and are now accessible to users, even parties from industries and academia.

Reportedly, some of the documents contain details of seismic survey information, which cover areas based in and around carbon storage licence and wind farm developments, which are based within the East Irish Sea. Similar kinds of reports have been made around carbon storage areas of the Central North Sea. Within this data, there is also original ‘raw’ data, which is still able to be reprocessed through the use of modern techniques, which have the potential to shed new light on the subsurface.

To make this all possible, the data was moved from the NHDA, which is being held at the British Geological Survey and it was transferred to the North Sea Transition Authority’s (NSTA) NDR, which is a freely-available archive. This particular archive already contains one petabyte of North Sea data and this includes seismic surveys and wellbore information. The reason behind making this transfer, was so that the legacy information could be consolidated into one place and simultaneously help users. Before making this transfer, the NHDA’s contents needed to go through a careful review, so that it could be determined which files had ‘reportable information’ and which files had information which overlapped with the existing NDR collection. Along with this, the remaining files, 2,437 of which were related to wellbores and 1,892 of which were related to surveys, were moved with the assistance of Moveout Data, an NDR service subcontractor.

Now that it has been moved, the information, which does include offshore surveys and well data, now much more easily supports various potential energy transition use cases, for instance carbon storage and offshore wind.

The collaboration which occurred between NSTA/BGS, was what enables the formulation of plans for the NHDA’s decommissioning. This has occurred after almost two decades of operation.

NSTA NDR Manager, Andy Thompson, commented, “This initiative reflects both organisations’ ongoing commitment to improving access to data to enable the UK’s energy transition, while maintaining energy security.”