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On the second floor of an antique brick building in Oklahoma City’s Automobile Alley, a new tech start-up works behind the scenes, quietly turning one of the nation’s largest industries on its head.

Oseberg shares its name with an ancient Viking ship unearthed in Norway in 1904, as well as one of the North Sea’s largest oil fields off the country’s southwestern coast.

The company refines data that’s freely available in public records, into a digital, searchable format which clients can use to answer critical questions like:

Who is likely to sell minerals at a good price?

What’s the best time to buy property—in this county, this section or parcel?

Where are the most productive drilling sites likely to be?

Oseberg software finds in days what would take teams of people years to locate sifting through paper files. In an industry that generates more than 7 percent of U.S. GDP, timely, more accurate decisions are game changers.

“It can tell you whether to expand a $200 million gathering system. It helps you figure out what your competitor is doing and why. It solves several problems for different users,” said Evan Anderson, Oseberg CEO and co-founder.

“The oil and natural gas industry is a very creative industry. It’s an old industry, which means it’s ripe for disruption. It’s heavily reliant on information and it’s incredibly capital intensive. It’s the beginning of the perfect storm that’s about to change everything.”

Once its proprietary software has been developed, Oseberg works closely with clients to show them how it can be nuanced to reach their goals.

“We ask what they’re trying to accomplish, then point them to the shortcut to get there,” said Elliot Harik, Oseberg’s director of engineering.

Oseberg continues to attract some of the brightest new talent from across the U.S., including a Johns Hopkins graduate from Baltimore, a Cal Tech engineer and many others. Recruits are pleasantly surprised at Oklahoma City’s vibrant and booming data-tech scene.

“I love difficult problems. I like to keep going at it until I either find a way through it or around it. It’s how my brain is wired. I just love doing it,” said Alex Adriaanse, Oseberg software engineer.

What Oseberg provides can affect billions of dollars in outcomes, and the oil and natural gas industry is starting to beat a path to its door. Meanwhile, the young company, and its impact on the industry are only getting started.

EnergyHQ is powered by the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board – OERB – which is voluntarily funded by the state's oil and natural gas producers and royalty owners. The OERB provides free environmental restoration of abandoned well sites and works to educate the state's citizens about the oil and natural gas industry. For more on the OERB's mission and how it is funded, visit OERB.com.