In line with UK Government targets, DTI are delivering most of their services digitally through the UK oil portal. DTI started issuing digitally signed chemical permits in January 2005 – see “DTI Goes Paperless” at http://www.gnn.gov.uk/environment/dti/. Decommissioning notices will follow in July 2006. During 2006/07 DTI will begin to require certain transactions to be delivered digitally signed. Licence Round applications (http://www.og.dti.gov.uk/consultations/e_licences.pdf) and Produced Water Trading are the first two such areas and DTI will consult on these.

DTI have worked with BP, Exxon, Shell and UKOOA to deliver a solution to this. The oil company interest was not only to enable them to satisfy regulatory requirements but also because they all had formative plans to move to PKI internally and were looking for a stimulus to externalise their plans.

In the course of the work DTI ran an industry consultation. The responses to this were all positive. The themes that emerged in the responses were that any solution must be low cost, easy to use, not UK centric and based on standards.

Following the consultation DTI ran a series of pilots with a number of companies and produced a set of Trust Rules that defined a set of standards for the issue and use of digital certificates for use in regulatory work in the UK. The view was that these Trust Rules, which were based upon emerging international standards, would have wider applicability in the global oil industry. 

The bulk of DTI's contact with the oil industry is through operators and to ensure that the Trust Rules reach a wider audience the management of the Trust Rules was moved to UKOOA. Furthermore it was necessary to extend the number of companies either consulted or collaborating in the work and an OGTS working Group has been formed.