Oil & Gas Blockchain Consortium goes ahead with project around expense approval

The OOC Oil & Gas
Blockchain Consortium has collaborated with Canadian software firm GuildOne to
successfully test the industry’s first blockchain application for Authorization
for Expenditure (AFE) balloting.

AFE focuses on cost and
expense approval, particularly in the upstream oil and gas process whereby
large expenditure is required with regards to exploration, development, and
production.

Integrating blockchain
to conventional AFE balloting would streamline and reduce the manually
intensive and largely paper-driven process of approving capital and expense projects
and provide immutable documentation of the final interests, the consortium notes.
The AFE balloting proof of concept (POC) tested the ability to send ballots and
make elections digitally utilising the technology, with smart contract enabled
workflows calculating working interests automatically.

This year, the AFE
balloting scope will be expanded to capture complicated scenarios, whereas
initial design and testing will be executed on the joint interest billing
exchange process that deals with the billing and payment of expenditures
between joint venture partners.

In September, the consortium announced that it would start testing the blockchain technology to lowering administrative costs in their field operations, along with reducing payment disputes and risk of fraud. It was reported that the contract was given to Houston-based software company Data Gumbo to pilot blockchain for water handling services in the Bakken shale field in North Dakota.

This time last year, post trade management platform VAKT announced three new strategic investors, in the shape of oil and gas giants Chevron, Total, and Reliance Industries, which are among the five of the world’s top ten largest oil and gas companies by market capitalisation. VAKT’s blockchain-based platform is said to be the world’s first fully operational enterprise-grade blockchain solution that assures major efficiency gains and cost savings for post-trade processing, including trade finance.

Interested in hearing more in person? Find out more at the Blockchain Expo World Series, Global, Europe and North America.   

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