Forget The Oil - Secure The Data!

There's data in them thar hills:

To the service companies specifically, owning the data — enough to fill 20 million file cabinets since 2010 alone — would mean a whole new revenue stream, perhaps as they sell subscriptions to huge data libraries.

“It’s like Netflix for oil and gas,” said John Gibson, an advisor at Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. who previously ran the oil-services business for Halliburton Co. “Imagine that all data is like a movie that many different people want to watch, but they want to watch it at different times.”

To the producers, though, owning that data means one less check they’d have to write. And it would ensure competing producers couldn’t see their data while stealthily moving into a new field.

...EOG Resources Inc., dubbed by one of its analysts as the Apple of the oilfield, is widely considered a leader among explorers for bypassing oilfield service companies to generate its own in-house innovations.

“Data is king and one of our most valuable resources,” Sandeep Bhakhri, chief information and technology officer at EOG, said. “You have to own the data. You cannot outsource its collection, analysis or delivery.”