Rystad Energy database (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

The Rystad Energy database is a paid licensed product (Rystad Energy), so it carries no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session. Treat it as unverified until someone exercises it through a Rystad subscription. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

The Rystad Energy database is an asset-level model of the global oil and gas industry: production volumes, operating and capital expenditures, reserves, and field-level economics, built bottom-up from individual fields and tied to the operating companies. Its products (UCube and related modules) are the reference source for firm-by-field production and cost data when public filings are too aggregated. A paper we distill uses it: Allcott, Montanari, Ozaltun & Tan use Rystad for the oil production and operating expenses of the seven oil supermajors across all of their oil fields worldwide (2018) when estimating the consumer-surplus component of corporate social impact and the high impact per dollar of revenue of oil producers under inelastic global demand.

• Cost: licensed, subscription. No free tier.
• Vendor: Rystad Energy (UCube and related upstream data products).
• Coverage: global upstream oil and gas at the field and company level, with production, cost, and reserve estimates; some figures are modeled rather than reported.

Access (when licensed)

• Through a Rystad Energy subscription. Data are accessed via Rystad’s platform (UCube and related modules) with extracts or API access where entitled; the grain runs from individual field to operating company to country aggregate.
• Company-by-field is the useful join. The citing paper aggregates field-level production and operating expense up to each supermajor; the field-to-operator mapping is the key Rystad provides that public filings do not.
• Credentials are required. Keep any credentials in .env, never hard-coded.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• Many figures are modeled, not reported. Rystad estimates field economics (costs, reserves, decline curves) from a proprietary model; they are estimates, not audited filings. Treat operating-cost and reserve numbers as vendor estimates and state that, as the citing paper’s supply-elasticity argument rests on them.
• Operator versus equity ownership of a field. Production attributed to a company can be on an operated basis or a working-interest basis; the two differ for joint ventures and partial stakes. Confirm which attribution you pulled before summing a firm’s output.
• Vintage revisions. Reserve and production estimates are revised as new information arrives, so the same field-year can change between data vintages. Pin the extract date; a re-pull will not reproduce an earlier number exactly.
• Coverage and quality vary by region and operator. Disclosure-poor jurisdictions and small private operators are modeled with less precision than listed majors. Country and company aggregates inherit that uneven precision.
• Unit and currency conventions. Volumes (barrels of oil equivalent versus oil only), cost units, and currency must be normalized before comparison; the oil-only restriction the citing paper applies is a deliberate scoping choice, not the database default.

Citation

Cite the vendor and product, e.g.: Rystad Energy (UCube), accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State which module and grain (field, company, country) were used, the extract vintage, and that production or cost figures are vendor estimates where applicable.