Largest Release in the RBDMS 3.0 Upgrade Goes Live in California

The Ground Water Protection Council (GWPC) is working with California’s Department of Conservation, Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) to upgrade RBDMS from a desktop application to a web application. This large project is broken into four distinct releases, each building upon the last. At the beginning of May, the second and largest release went live. Release 2 functionality includes well and facility management, transfers of well/facility ownership, production reporting, underground injection control (UIC), payments, and California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) permits.

Release 2 focuses on the areas where operators are interacting with the system to submit permit applications, data, and reports. When Release 1 went live, DOGGR worked with over 200 operators in the State of CA to identify specific personnel within their organizations who would serve as administrators.  DOGGR trained these administrators who began using the functionality provided with the first release. With the completion of Release 2 in May 2018, additional users from the top 10 operators within California, representing 85% to 90% of the wells in the state, were trained and registered in WellSTAR (which is the California customization of RBDMS 3.0). These additional users within the operator organizations will begin submitting information in the coming weeks. This gradual approach allows bugs to be worked out of the system before the full load of users are submitting data.

Release 2 drove significant changes to DOGGR’s business processes. This resulted in multiple DOGGR forms being added or changed to streamline data submission. While operators can still choose to submit these forms on paper, WellSTAR has now enabled them to complete their submissions via online forms (RBDMS eForm 3.0), Electronic Data Delivery (EDD), or Business-2-Government (B2G) system-to-system communication. EDDs are electronic files that the operator can upload to populate an online form. B2G allows data to transfer securely from operator systems into RBDMS.

Release 3 development is now under way with a target release date at the end of October. The focus of Release 3 functionality is DOGGR internal processes and will include incident reporting, filing complaints, conducting field inspections of wells/facilities, and tracking compliance. Public access to the data collected through RBDMS will also be rolled out. As RBDMS 3.0 continues to be built in California, other states such as Colorado and North Dakota are already implementing some of the technology with additional states soon to come.