For anyone who works in the oil and gas industry, www.mye-energy.com is a portal. Owned by myMarketWorks Inc. of Calgary, mye-energy.com has gathered an exhaustive list of links and resources, news services, commodity quoting sources, exchange rate providers, industry statistics and countless technical tools for engineers, managers, field workers and sales people involved in energy exploration, drilling and pipeline activities.

Even more valuable, however, is mye-energy's digital "Rolodex" of companies and individuals. With more than 18,000 entries, the database lists offices of oil and gas producers and the suppliers of services, equipment and products they buy to the tune of $18 billion a year. That list, too, is free. Just click on an icon, in fact, to email or go directly to a company's Web site, if it has one.

The only part of the site for which users must pay is the additional database of 40,000 contacts at the listed companies, a tool that myMarketWorks meticulously maintains with eight full-time researchers. Each entry also lists the individual's job responsibilities.

Company president Brad Gaulin says mye-energy.com is not a purchasing site, but rather the creator of an "e-marketplace" - a business introduction service, if you like.

"We're not trying to be a middleman," he says. "I don't think in the long run a model of procurement will stand up. Anyone who wants to be a middleman taking a percentage of the transaction has to think of a way to add more value. The Internet tends to de-intermediate - people want to deal directly with one another. Where we will make money is by facilitating a relationship."

Most of the mye-energy.com site is already wireless-enabled, meaning that a field engineer who finds he urgently needs a part for a gas compressor can dial into the site with a wireless PDA or Internet-enabled cellphone, specify the product type and find every company that supplies the needed part. He could then click on the company name to get basic corporate information, then connect directly to its Web site.

Using the contact database, a salesperson could conduct a search for all individuals in charge of purchasing a specific kind of oil and gas production equipment, for instance, create a separate file and send the names to a PDA in preparation for a sales call.

Online in its beta version since June, mye-energy.com now has about 90 subscriber companies and in the last couple of months has tripled traffic to about 25,000 page hits a day. Mr. Gaulin expects the site to operating profitably by spring.

He says the immediate goal is to build more subscriptions and traffic. "Every one of the 18,000 listings in our database is a prospective customer, because they're either producers or suppliers. The challenge now is making people aware that this information is here and for sale."

Meanwhile, he sees mye-energy.com capitalizing on the Internet's potential to connect the oil and gas industry with itself. "If you're buying stuff worth more than $100,000 - as this industry does - you've got to have a relationship," he says. "If you can't facilitate a new relationship, you can't have critical mass and that's what's crippling most vertical portals."