Petroleum

In today’s hydrocarbon market, earth imagery significantly lowers operating costs, facilitates sound decision making, and contributes to responsible development of this important resource through all of the phases of finding, producing, and distributing it.

The Oil and Gas Industry has used imagery and remote sensing to coarsely map areas for decades, but advances in digital technology and remote sensing applications since then has multiplied the value and variety of uses for imagery throughout the oilfield lifespan. Today, your imagery dollar investment results in 10 to 1,000 times greater savings in planning, executing, and monitoring exploration and production throughout the oil/gas field cycle.

Explore the World for New Sources

Imagery is vital to exploration, geophysical surveying and in determining suitable drill sites based on surface conditions. A high-resolution image acquired prior to exploration and drilling activity serves as a baseline for other activities including site modeling, facilities monitoring, environmental assessments, and vegetation reclamation. Analyzing high resolution imagery before seismic surveying helps oil and gas companies build accurate surface models and avoid poorly suited areas. Spectral bandwidth available from our satellite imagery allows surface characterization and identification of surface obstacles.

Facilities and Asset Management

When the detailed phase of exploration is underway, high-resolution imagery is essential for aiding in decisions regarding survey access and design of well pads and roads. The need for more detailed, higher resolution imagery becomes apparent as oil companies progress to well planning, pipeline planning, and siting, environmental impact analysis and refinery design. For these tasks, our satellite image resolution of 60cm or better and aerial image resolution as fine as 3 inches ideal for informed analysis.

Reach Wider Geographies

Oil and gas companies face new challenges as well: how to explore cost effectively in remote regions (especially those in developing nations with limited mapping data and infrastructure) and how to optimize existing production in already discovered oil and gas fields. Our satellite imagery, with its uniform quality and standard product suite available everywhere, is the ideal choice for remote and international targets and in expanding multi-well pad designs.

Environmental Protection

Finally, petroleum companies are monitoring their environmental impact much more rigorously now, both in North America and around the world. Our multispectral imagery is essential for mapping land use and environmental impact. Periodic resurveying of oil fields, pipeline corridors, and refineries is an efficient and accurate method for ensuring that environmental impact is limited to an absolute minimum. By measuring the length and width of the right of way through which seismic lines have been acquired, oil companies can document their impact on the local forests and vegetation. Multi-date imagery is critical too when you need it because the information is time stamped documentation of land status on a fixed date.

Strategic use of periodically acquired imagery from orbiting satellites and low flying aircraft enhances technical analysis and the bottom line for all professionals involved in oilfield and regulatory operations. Our imagery assures alignment between GIS data and ground truth and provides a strong foundation for sound decision making throughout the oil and gas lifecycle.