Upstream oil and gas software

Running the oilfield's books, from the well to the payment

Petrol and cooking gas start as crude oil and natural gas, pumped out of wells. The oil and gas industry has three parts:

Upstream

finding oil and gas, drilling wells and producing from them.

Midstream

moving and storing it, mostly through pipelines.

Downstream

refining it and selling the fuel.

The three parts of the oil and gas industry: upstream finds and produces oil and gas, midstream moves and stores it, and downstream refines it and sells the fuel; this Market Segment is about the accounting of the upstream part.

This Market Segment is about the accounting of the upstream part. The companies that do this work are called oil and gas producers.

Why oil needs its own accounting. Every company keeps accounts, usually in an ERP system. (More on ERP in Market Segment 10.1, ERP and business accounting software, in Industry Vertical 10, ERP and business automation.) But an American oil and gas producer has problems that ordinary accounting software was not built for:

The land belongs to someone else

In America, the owner of a piece of land usually owns the oil and gas under it too. In India, these belong to the government. So an American producer signs a lease with each landowner for the right to drill. A large producer holds thousands of leases, each with its own terms.

Royalties

The lease gives the landowner a share of the money from whatever the well produces. This share is called a royalty. It has to be worked out and paid every month.

Shared wells

A well is often owned by several companies together. One of them runs it, and the others pay their share of the costs and take their share of the income.

Production

The producer must record how much oil and gas each well produced, and where it was sent.

One well's income may have to be split among dozens of owners, every month. The software in this market does that work. It covers four areas: accounting, land (the leases), production and planning.

Why oil needs its own accounting: every month, one well's income is split among the landowner, who takes a royalty under the lease, the company that runs the well and the other owners who share its costs and income.

Where the market is. It is a specialist market, and mostly American. The buyers are North American oil and gas producers.

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.

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Accounting, land and production software

Accounting, land and production software

Quorum Software

with engineers in Pune, sells accounting, land, production and planning software. Many North American oil and gas producers run on it. Quorum builds much of it in Pune, and has the most job postings in this Market Segment.

W Energy

with engineers in Bengaluru, sells cloud software for the same upstream accounting and operations.

The large oil and gas companies, Shell, bp, Chevron and ExxonMobil among them, run their own engineering centres in India. (More on them in the GCC collection.)

The lease read by AI.

An oil producer's land department works through thousands of leases and contracts, each with its own terms. AI models now read them and pull out what the producer owes. They then check this against what was produced and what was paid. The back office of oil is being automated at the same time as the industry faces its own long shift away from oil and gas.

That is the accounting of the oilfield: who owns each well, what each landowner is owed, and how much each well produced. It is a small, specialist market that serves North American producers, and much of its software is built in Pune.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What energy and climate tech companies hire for.

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