Dive Brief:

• Central Rural Electric Cooperative (CREC) worked with Devon Energy to better understand the oil producer's power needs in Oklahoma.
• The two companies used a new system to share data, allowing the utility to better understand Devon's planning requirements.
• The new process eliminates data-format confusion that kept Devon and CREC from working together efficiently.

Dive Insight:

As energy companies seek out oil and gas in increasingly remote locations, powering those drilling sites is a growing challenge, The Oklahoman reports. CREC told the newspaper it is on pace to double its system capacity to 250 MW by next year, and said the biggest challenge is knowing where new demand will crop up so infrastructure improvements can be made.

Each drilling side requires about 1 MW, CREC said, about the size of a large retail store, and often in areas that have never had power service.

But according to The Oklahoman, CREC and Devon are collaborating on a data sharing project along with Oklahoma State University’s National Energy Solutions Institute that allows the utility and drilling industries to plan more efficiently. Because the two industries typically look at data in different formats, planning power needs has been a difficult process. But a new web portal has helped simplify the process, making it more efficient for drilling companies to enter service requests.

The Oklahoman spoke with Brandy Wreath, director of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission’s public utility division, who said the new system works because “everybody’s putting in the same information, in the same format."