IHS Inc., a provider of integrated oil and gas information and software and consulting services, and Petrotechnical Open Standards Consortium, Inc. (POSC), a provider of information and business process standards for the upstream oil and gas industry, have signed a letter of intent to establish a service that will provide an industry standard for global unique well identifiers for all known oil and gas wells in the world.

Since no global definition of what represents a well exists and there are more than 4 million wells known to exist globally, oil companies, service companies, governments and regulatory agencies differ in their practices and naming conventions. The new IHS/POSC service will provide a common method to address these challenges.

Through the service IHS will continue to generate standard identifiers for all new and unique wells, deliver a complete Master Well Index file to customers comprised of the unique well identifiers and supporting attributes for reference and matching purposes, and provide a well-matching service to the industry by delivering a set of unique well identifiers from the Master Well Index against well data supplied by any industry organization.