GIS in Oil and Gas

BY SANGEETA DEOGAWANKA


As an industry that fuels progress, development and basic human needs, the oil and gas industry is a vital part of the global economy. It is also the most capital intensive. Revenues are large, as are the costs. It also makes headlines for unforeseen accidents and environmental hazards. The ever changing dynamics of this industry drives sustained efforts for increased efficiencies and risk mitigation. This is where GIS and supporting technologies step in with limitless uses and seamless applications.

The Oil and Gas industry is driven by an estimated 80% data that has a spatial component. This is the only industry that harnesses spatial information at every stage of the life-cycle, beginning with opportunity analysis and exploration, through appraisal and production, right up to the abandonment phase.

INTERACTIVE WEB MAP SHOWING OIL AND GAS BASINS IN U.S., WITH LINKS TO GEOLOGIC REPORTS

So companies are beginning to understand the importance of geospatial to maximize ROI as well as minimize risks. Beginning with the integration of spatial databases within existing systems, the oil and gas sector has also begun looking at software companies to come up with industry-specific software, tools and models to maximize value from their investments.

For the geospatially driven this is an industry to look at. Assets, offices, sites, workers as well as operations are geographically dispersed. So large and complex data is utilized to explore and manage the spatially distributed assets and operations. Dedicated maps and models are proving to be the most effective way to visualize and communicate. The spatial component is however still underutilized, and out-of-the box GIS solutions are needed to address the vast needs of this industry. With the surface barely scratched, there is an enormous potential for geospatial technology employment and software development.

GLOBAL ENERGY MAPPER – A SPATIAL DATA AND VISUALIZATION TOOL FOR OIL AND GAS INDUSTRY

GIS deployment through the oil field life-cycle

Well Planning and Acquisition

• Basin Analysis – map of potential hydrocarbon accumulations; hydrological modeling; sub-surface secondary fluid migration network mapping; flow direction – flow accumulation mapping across DEM; potential migration pathways, etc.
• Play Analysis – risk segment mapping for each petroleum play element; regional risk mapping; geological maps; ground truthing or validating imagery through field surveys
• Acreage Analysis – rapid evaluation and gradation of opportunities using multi-disciplinary asset data and assigning weightings and criteria; ranking of acreage, petroleum leases, blocks and companies; exploration statistics in visual platform, etc.
• Prospect Analysis – hydrocarbon reserve or volume estimation; raster analysis based deterministic prospect volume of petroleum reservoirs; reserve estimation and spatial analysis of well data in unconventional hydrocarbon, like shale, and so on.

Seismic planning – terrain analysis; seismic survey maps and data; satellite image processing and spatial analysis; etc.

Exploration

• Well Planning – well planning around multiple drilling constraints; GIS tools used in well pattern optimization workflows
• Drilling –spatial analysis within GIS for optimized well drilling patterns and efficient configurations
• Production – GIS allows data integration and visualization of production volumes, injection rates and recovery efficiency in near real-time

Exploration (Onshore) – visual framework for exploration across assets; 3D modeling of geological, geophysical and petrophysical hierarchical data

Exploration (Offshore) – bathymetry mapping; sea floor surveys; shipping lane maps with data integration; 3D seismic analysis; on-demand satellite image processing for offshore mapping and exploration activities

Field Operations – GIS supports drilling around surface and geologic constraints; improved field production efficiencies for whole reservoirs /basins; data integration and visualization in real time for production dashboards, coordinated workflows and personnel across rig sites; Dynamic Hazard modeling for resource allocation; asset tracking in real time; updated DEMs to help detect subsidence caused by extraction and much more.

Facilities management – 3D GIS with field layout helps accurate monitoring of associated environmental changes in near real time for HSE (Health, Safety and Environment) and emergency response during oil spills, leaks or explosions.

EMERGENCY RESPONSE SYSTEM FOR TRACKING GAS LEAK – USING ARCGIS

Distribution and Pipeline management – least cost path analysis for distribution network; network analysis for environment friendly and cost effective routes; pipeline monitoring for geo-hazards and leaks; tracking of inspections using remotely acquired data; monitoring and analysis of spatially dispersed data in real-time; seafloor geodesy and asset management in offshore operations, etc.

LEAST COST PATH ROUTES WITH WEIGHTED OVERLAYS (1,2,3) VIS-A-VIS THEOGALLALA AQUIFER CASE STUDY (KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE, NEBRASKA)

Pipeline Routing and Vehicle / Fleet Tracking – A GIS ecosystem supports tracking of valuable assets in a capital intensive sector. The precise location of vehicles and ships ensures timely delivery of goods and services, as well as efficient emergency response.

ASSET AND FLEET MANAGEMENT BY OIL COMPANY SAUDI ARAMCO – USING ARCGIS

Decommissioning – field data from earlier phases of the oil field life cycle centralized in enterprise GIS help to remove infrastructure and assets, and recover the site for land use.

Benefits of GIS in Oil and Gas 

• Empowers decision making – which acreage or play to enter, how to shorten portfolio workflows, how to plan the optimal pipeline route, integrate results of seismic survey, planning emergency response, better management of facilities, manage pipeline outage and leaks, etc.
• Supports future action and ongoing exploration activities – By standardizing processes and reducing technical uncertainty, GIS improves exploration efficiency. The GIS framework models a consistent exploration processes across all assets within the company. This supports a consistent, auditable corporate prospect portfolio, for ongoing portfolio decisions.
• Increased efficiencies – multi disciplinary data integration for risk assessment and uncertainty, better access for cutting wasteful downtime, optimized maintenance schedules; monitoring and analysis of daily fleet movements in real time, least cost path analysis for pipeline routing, standardized portfolio workflows, cutting down decision cycle times, etc.
• Cost saving – an estimate of 10-30 per cent cut in operational costs, prevention and management of incidental or accidental costs, efficient pipeline and fleet management saves costs, optimized drilling and operation workflows enhances ROI, and so on.
• Seamless management with a real-time mapping visualization and analysis of remote /offshore sites, operations and assets
• Improved communication across spatially dispersed locations
• Record keeping – the huge data loaded in centralized GIS builds a strong framework for managing data with full transaction support and reporting tools.

Conclusion


The Oil and Gas industry has been a comparative late comer to GIS. However, it is fast emerging as the industry with the highest potential of GIS application through the entire life-cycle. What’s more, it enables a seamless integration of geospatial technologies like UAV, sensors, and existing computer systems within the GIS framework. This is helping companies compete in the global race to unlock new energy sources and maximize value from its assets.

Source: GIS Lounge - Maps and GIS

6 Amazing Global Agriculture Maps – Farming Visualized

Agriculture Maps

Visualizing Farming with Agriculture Maps
Ever wonder where your food comes from? We have 6 agriculture maps to show you the answer.

Almost every bit of the food we eat is grown and gathered on farms. Humans have learned how to change the environment to most-effectively grow crops. We’ve also learned to produce more crops with less land. But a number of issues threatens agriculture sustainability – population increase, climate change and water stress.

Feast your eyes on these agriculture maps and learn what the future of farming holds.

1. Agricultural Exposure to Water Stress Map
Agriculture takes advantage of the nutrients in the soil and the amount of water that is available. Water is the key. When crops aren’t getting enough water, farmers have to find ways to bring water to the crops. This is called irrigation. Irrigation can change dry land into fertile farmland. To get water needed for crops, we build reservoirs and drill deep wells. Irrigation is a big part of farming.

The World Resources Institute has mapped out where these water stresses exist in the world. The Agriculture Exposure to Water Stress Map measures the ratio of local withdrawal (demand) over the available water (supply). Countries like India, Morocco, Spain and the Philippines face high cropland water stress.. Other major commodity crops are visualized like coffee, rice and cereals.

2. Feeding the World Map

Crop production will have to double by 2050 to fulfill the needs of a growing and increasingly affluent population. Meeting this challenge will be difficult but not impossible, according to the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment

Can Global Crop Production Meet Future Demands? The University of Minnesota is exploring current crop yields and solutions to the biggest problems in agriculture. This is the purpose of the Feeding the World Story Map. In order to tackle this growing problem, we will have to:

• Make croplands more productive
• Increase water use efficiency
• Change crop use & diet

3. World Bank Agricultural Land (% of land area)

World Bank has a unique set of Agriculture Maps showing historical and future farming trends. Agriculture maps include:

• Agricultural irrigated land (% of total agricultural land)
• Agricultural land (% of land area)
• Agricultural machinery (tractors per 100 sq km of arable land)
• Agriculture, value added (% of GDP)
• Agriculture, value added per worker (constant 2005 US$)

4. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations Hunger Map

One in seven people on Earth live on less than one dollar each day
Hunger means going without an adequate meal for days. It prevents adults from working and stunts the growth of babies. It affects one out of nine people every day. The majority of hunger issues are in developing countries.

The United Nations is combating hunger with its Millennium Development Goal (MDG) program. The UN has set a target to halve in the developing world. The interactive UN Hunger Map raises awareness about global hunger.

5. ISRIC Soil Grids 1KM
Plants live in dirt. Rich topsoil is filled of living things like bugs, worms, roots and dead leaves. In the soil business, this is called organic material. Let’s say topsoil comprised of 10% organic material and the rest sand and rocks. The nutrients that plants take up in their roots comes from that 10% organic material. Without organic material, hardly any plants could grow. And it takes centuries for topsoil to grow.

But other factors come into play for crop production. Soil texture (sand %, silt % and clay %) is important because it influences nutrient retention. Cation exchange capacity indicates how the soil can supply nutrients like calcium, magnesium and potassium.

ISRIC’s 1km Global Soil Map helps with agriculture decision-making. Some of the greatest soil maps can be found with properties like taxonomy, organic carbon, pH in H2O, sand %, silt %, clay %, cation exchange capacity, bulk density and coarse fragments

6. FAO Global Spatial Database of Agricultural Land-use Statistics
Agro-maps breaks down primary food crops by sub-national administrative districts. The information is aggregated by crop production, area harvested and crop yields.

About 40% of the global workforce is in agriculture. That’s 1.3 billion people. This means that agriculture is the world’s largest provider of jobs. In the FAO Global Spatial Database and Agricultural Land-use Interactive Map, you get a limited yet very important component of land use.

Agriculture Maps for Decision Making
Agriculture feeds the globe. We can see which crop types are suited for different environments in this list of agriculture maps.

Farming also faces a number of problems – population increase, climate change, hunger and water stress. Agriculture maps can convey this information to make knowledgeable decisions.

Instantly, you have become more knowledgeable about agricultural issues with these 6 agriculture maps.

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Afternoon Plenary Session, Esri User Conference 2015: The Importance of Location

By Susan Smith



Decision making in GIS would not be possible without knowledge of location and with it, a sense of place and culture. The stories of the afternoon plenary session at Esri UC 2015 showcased real life examples of this reality, from fighting the Ebola epidemic to fighting crime in Baltimore.

One attendee noted that the stories represented some of the different industry segments that Esri was involved in – health, education, exploration, environmental studies, politics, government, public safety, to name a few.

Ending Ebola
Dr. Bruce Aylward, who worked for the World Health Organization (WHO) for almost 25 years, was a key force in stopping polio in Africa. Last year two weeks from now, he called Jack Dangermond to say , WHO had recruited him to lead the Ebola effort. “Over the last 12 months, we’ve been struggling with greatest challenge in public health with Ebola,” said Dr. Aylward. “There is an extraordinary international and national response, and the role of GIS has been to steer response over the past 12 months. This crisis is not over. It may have disappeared from our TV screens but is very much part of these countries in West Africa. GIS is very important to help us get this finished.”

Aylward makes it clear that we don’t know much about this disease but what is known is chilling. It can kill 90% of the people it infects, there is no vaccine and no cure. It has only been known about for approximately 30 years. In 1976, it appeared in an infected animal, and there were 2 dozen outbreaks in between 1976 – 2012. “We didn’t know how to diagnose it. By really engaging and educating these communities about this disease, finding every case, and getting them into the treatment center, and tracing their contacts, we could break the chain of transmission,” said Dr. Aylward. There is a great need to ensure safe burials. “This disease is one of the most unforgiving we know of. It doesn’t allow families to care for their sick without getting sick themselves. They can’t bury their dead safely.”

When Ebola hit West Africa in 2014, the outbreak began similarly to the way it happened in central Africa originally, and may have come from an infected bat. The virus did something different this time. “The virus took advantage of the fact no one had seen it before and when they finally began to know about it, it had already spread across over 26,000 people, 11,000 people dead,” said Dr. Aylward.
“Stopping the outbreak would require extraordinary international and national response.”

Cultural problems were on the horizon as specially clad teams would have to come and carry away the dead which proved terrifying to the people in the small villages. This is a beautiful area, but the terrain isolates villages and also fed the rumor mill of who was coming to help and what the disease actually was.

By August, the disease had begun to increase exponentially, with a very different profile than it had had in past outbreaks. This was followed by international panic, as it was found in a person in Nigeria who had traveled from Liberia. By that time, 10 countries had experienced the disease. The CDC predicted 1 million people would be dead within six months from Ebola.

What ensued was the declaration of an international emergency to create a major response to get these countries under control. Instead of the type of help needed, airlines stopped flying into the affected countries, economies ground to a halt and countries were isolated.

In September of 2014, the secretary general of the United Nations went to the UN Security Council and declared this a crisis, and the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response was formed. This supported the NGOs who were already working on the ground to help stop the crisis.

The target set for the UN on September 23rd was to reverse the projection of the CDC, have 70% safe burials, isolate 70% of the infectious cases over the next 60 days, in which time a huge number of Ebola treatment centers were built.

Safe burials were calculated with GIS modeling tools. Using drive time analysis, the teams could calculate that patients could be within 1-2 hours of a treatment center.

An effort to find every case and make sure they were properly treated and managed was spearheaded by UNICEF. “We had to shift to the next point of strategy, we had to find every single case, contact related to the case, at a time when people were very suspicious of the response,” said Aylward. “They were hiding cases and corpses so they could bury and care for them themselves.” This required searching for cases house by house to stop the transmission chains of disease in the countries affected.

The virus had twice reached zero before it took off and soared, because it existed in villages that WHO and other organizations hadn’t found yet. The disease has not been completely eradicated because there is a “long tail of contact tracing that still remains in corners of these countries,” said Aylward. “We have not finished the job, and cannot finish it without skills. The closer we get to zero the more important GIS response becomes.” The virus needs to be eradicated so that it can’t soar again.

They have a new tool just developed to guide this final aspect of the program of finding every single case. They will be able to target infected areas and see where the most recent contacts are.

There is difficulty getting to zero cases because of community distrust, financial gaps, the rainy season (current) and imperfect information. “We have much better information due to GIS. Almost all this can found on our web portal,” said Aylward. “We’re still very short of expertise we need to get the job done. We may have one mapper, sometimes two. What’s most important, I’d want about a dozen GIS experts out in the field.”

While Ebola is no longer front page news, airlines are not flying to Liberia, Sierra Leona and New Guinea. They are still affected and things have “ground to a halt.”

National Geographic Society
The National Geographic Society has been a big user of GIS for many years. Gary Nell, formerly of Sesame Street and NPR and currently CEO of National Geographic, spoke about journalist Paul Solomon, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his reporting. Solomon’s claim to fame is that he has walked from Herto Bouri, Ethiopia and plans to hit the tip of Ushuaia, Argentina in 2020. His goal is to retrace the path of human migration across the entire earth in his “Eden Walk.”

Solomon is writing about Edenwalk (#edenwalk), with 700 classrooms across several continents following his journey and adventures. He gives children a Skype view of the walk. Students who began following him in second grade will watch him when he finishes. One teacher remarked that the learning students have gained from following his journey is “above and beyond the history program.”

Nell talked about engaging the curiosity of children and remaining curious “from K to gray.” Curious, critical thinkers, with decision making skills, are what employers also want. He noted that Alexander Graham Bell almost beat the Wright Brothers in inventing the plane. He was the first person to have photos in National Geographic.

“40% of kids under age 2 are using smartphones and tablets regularly,” said Nell. “This isn’t going away. Kids are digital natives. They will never know the world without it. We need to figure out real world apps that relate to them.”

“We need to connect kids to outdoor learning, Bioblitz, using smartphones for document findings,” said Nell. “The power to tell stories is greater than it’s ever been.”

K-12 Program
Charlie Fitzpatrick, a former National Geographic employee, is a mainstay at the Esri User Conference with his tireless work with the K-12 program for Esri. He reported that a year ago, Esri joined Obama’s ConnectEd program. Now they have over 1700 programs in place. However, he doesn’t feel they are growing fast enough. He asked for more geomentors to join the program at geomentors.net.

On the island of Molokai, Hawaii, young mangrove in the Niaupala fishpond on the east side of Molokai, are invasive to coral reefs. Mangroves have an aerial root structure that has grown bigger, denser and taller than anywhere in world, at 5 feet in diameter and 80 feet tall. This is caused by overgrazing and agriculture.

Lily and Sara Jenkins are two students who have been studying the problem and have calculated the total present day area of mangrove, and with aerial imagery and coastal surveys, figured out that mangrove has inundated over 2/3 of the fishpond area. Only two fishponds are in working condition. Mangrove can turn open ocean in to dry land, according to the two researchers. The two students have won awards for their research and Sara will be attending university next year to study environmental studies.

Governor Martin O’Malley

Governor Martin O’Malley, Maryland between 2007-2015, is not a technologist, he says he is a generalist. He spoke of the need for government that works, that is creative and sustainable. What some attendees may or may not know (it was not mentioned in his talk) is that he is planning to run in the 2016 presidential race.

He sees the Web GIS transforming organizations and as a movement from authoritarian to shared understanding.

President Clinton helped Baltimore put 200 more police officers on the streets. O’Malley said where those police officers were sent reflected a decision to put them where they could save the most lives, which meant putting them where there were the greatest number of citizens being shot, robbed and murdered each year. The result was that Baltimore achieved the largest reduction in Part 1 crime of any major city in American from 2004-2009.

O’Malley talked about the essential question most people want to know when faced with maps: Can you show me my house? It can also be phrased as a demand: show me my house. This demonstrates how location matters. “We can only understand from the place that we know,” he said.

Summary

To me, the stories told in the afternoon session all reflect the importance of location:

– critical need to know the location of disease in the Ebola story

– the eagerness of students to know about the location of Paul Solomon as he traversed areas of the world that these students had not heard of before, bringing them a personalized history and geography lesson

– the location of mangrove on the island of Molokai to bring attention to the need for environmental intervention

– the location of crime spots in Baltimore to facilitate a program to diminish crime in that city, a program that ultimately saved lives and ensured public safety

All these stories lead to the importance of not just points on a map, but to the lives and culture of people living with daily challenges that can be diminished or solved by having a better understanding of where they are, the landscape they live in, and the resources they have at their disposal.

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