Blockchain Database Applications in UIC at Kern County
John P. Yu, Pedro Arredondo, Jason Cotton · SPE Western Regional Meeting · 2022
Abstract Kern County has a population of 900,000 and has been ranked as one of the nation's most productive in both agriculture and petroleum generation. The petroleum industry often requires the injection of water, gas, or other fluids to enhance oil recovery. The possibility of underground water contamination can be of concern in this region where petroleum operations occur alongside drinking water extraction processes. Kern County's petroleum production plays a vital economic role on both a local and national level. Similarly, underground aquifers contain uncontaminated water that is a significant source of municipal drinking water and supply to large-scale agriculture operations. Due to this adjacency, both industry and regulatory agencies closely scrutinize operations to ensure human and environmental health. The blockchain is a developing peer-to-peer network technology for securely distributing and storing data. A blockchain network consists of several peers, each capable of creating blocks and validating blocks, each with an identical copy of the current blockchain. These blocks consist of transactions, or any type of data record, that have been submitted to the network for validation. Once enough transactions have been submitted, they are bundled into a block which is hashed with the hash of the previous block to create a unique identifier. The regulatory agencies will not be able to make changes except review and approve the project. The block and identifier are then transmitted to every other peer on the network. If the identifier is found to be valid, meaning that the data stored in the sending peer's blockchain has not been altered, the block is added to the receiving peer's local copy. This allows the blockchain to act as immutable ledger, making it an excellent choice for distributing data while maintaining its integrity. Therefore, we can use this secure blockchain network for the underground injection control (UIC) process. We have successfully built a prototype blockchain database and implement an underground injection control (UIC) project in the database. The East Shallow Oil Zone (ESOZ) Fault Block 7A is used for the field case study. All requested documents in the project #22800007 input as the Well Summary GUI and the Regulatory GUI pages for the project review and approval.