High Tech Oil Barrel Tracking Translates into Profits for Tribes Story-Date: 12:33 p.m. PST Sunday , September 28, 1997 ------------------------------------------------------------ High Tech Oil Barrel Tracking Translates into Profits for Tribes By K. Marie Porterfield, Indian Country Today, Rapid City, S.D. Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News FT. WASHAKIE, Wyo.--Sep. 29--Tracking 1.6 million barrels of oil a year isn't an easy job, but it must be done and done well if the Shoshone and Arapaho tribes are to survive. "Ninety-eight to 99 percent of the tribes' income is derived from oil and gas," said Floyd Phillips, a realty specialist for the BIA at the Wind River Agency in Ft. Washakie, Wyoming. "Efficiency is critical." As part of a technological push to help tribes across the nation become self-sufficient and give them the ability to do more with less in the face of budget cut-backs, the BIA has developed state-of-the art resource management tools. "It is important for tribal governments to have the best data available regarding their natural resources to actively, and intelligently manage their resources," said Hilda Manual, deputy commissioner of Indian Affairs said. The high-tech services the BIA Division of Energy and Mineral Resources, Geographic Data Service Center and the Division of Forestry's branch of Forest Resources Planning have developed are offered to resource owners and tribes for free and are designed to be user friendly. One of the first, a work station called the National Indian Oil and Gas Evaluation and Monitoring System, has been tested at Wind River since 1995 'd will be ready for distribution to other tribes in the near future, according to the BIA. "I'm still learning," said Shoshone Oil and Gas Commissioner, John Enos of the NIOGEMS work station. "Already I can accomplish more than I did before in less time. It's getting too big to keep track of the way we used to. Technology is the way we have to go." In addition to 1.6 million barrels of oil per year, 12 million MCFs (1,000 cubic feet) of gas are on Wind River Reservation. The production comes from about 700 wells. "Before NIOGEMS, when tribes contracted and compacted in the area of energy and mineral resources they were dealing with 27 different data bases which covered such things as royalties, accounting, production and realty," said Dick Wilson, director of the BIA's Division of Energy and Mineral Resources in Denver. After four years of work by the BIA, the information from those data bases can be accessed and windowed; a point-and-click environment at a single work station. "We can compile the information into graph form for quick decision making, so that the people won't have to cull the information they need from the 27 data bases," Mr. Wilson said. "Before, if I wanted to find out about the production of a certain well, I'd have to go into the well data program and then go into another program to get it in a graph," Mr. Phillips said. "I'd be using six or seven programs. Now I just click on a well and get all of the data I need." The program is primarily being used on Wind River Reservation to gather information for development plans. "We used it to predict when current production would exhaust itself," he said. "When we have contracts, we can track the progress of operators and drilling. We can find out things like are payments on the leases current or has somebody drilled nearby and is draining my lease," he said. The work station is also able to generate maps of land parcels from legal descriptions. The system is hooked by wireless to the Shoshone Arapaho tribal building where officials can access the information in order to predict production, a crucial part of the tribe's planning process. ----- Visit Indian Country Today on the World Wide Web at http://www.indiancountry.com/ ----- (c) 1997, Indian Country Today, Rapid City, S.D. Distributed by Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News. ------------------------------------------------------------