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Leveraging Imagery, Mapping and Other Data to Enhance Oil and Gas Pipeline Assessments
Whether assessing a pipeline, laying new pipe or repairing damaged facilities, oil and gas companies, as well as utilities and other organizations with distributed assets, must be able to deliver accurate location-based information to the field so they can manage those assets, quickly resolve disruptions in service and safely expand operations.
With the increased prevalence and adoption of imagery and data solutions, oil and gas companies and infrastructure companies, can now obtain, gather and analyze geospatial data in unique ways to support rapid, informed decision-making.
For instance, in August, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration granted ConocoPhillips the ability to fly commercial drones off the coast of Alaska, which the company will reportedly do to enhance its exploration operations. It is clear that capabilities like these will feed location-awareness solutions that will be a main driver for enhancing efficiencies for any company in the sector.
TerraGo allows oil and gas companies to integrate location information, as well as geospatial collaboration capabilities, into existing workflows. Oil, gas, energy and utilities professionals can quickly produce, access, update and share complex, geospatial information with anyone, anywhere, at any time. As such, organizations no longer need to rely as heavily on paper-based, manual processes that are operationally and financially inefficient.
The TerraGo location intelligence platform, TerraGo Vision, helps oil and gas personnel find the most relevant information from any source — including news feeds, blog posts, social media and more — to automate and streamline the often complex, manual processes involved in competitive analysis, security management and other intelligence-gathering aspects of petroleum operations.
TerraGo Vision seamlessly integrates data with leading GIS systems from Esri and others, produces multi-layer GeoPDF mapbooks, and provides field personnel with on-demand geospatial information for a specific area of interest (AOI).
Oil and gas companies can leverage these solutions for accessing and integrating geospatial information throughout every phase of the petroleum lifecycle, including:
• Exploration: Create and distribute 2D and 3D digital maps and imagery for subsurface modeling, seismic surveys, surface geologic studies, subsurface and cross-section interpretations and profiling maps.
• Production: Improve production management by providing meaningful context to data collected on surveillance data, production data, pipeline integrity, incident management and logistics management.
• Distribution: Empower organizations to analyze, locate and monitor pipeline operations to protect integrity and safety for processes related to construction and right-of-way permitting, pipeline design, facilities design, scenario modeling and environmental studies.
• Business Operations: Provide executives and decision-makers with access to geospatial data critical to business operations, including asset management, cost factors, volume growth, gasoline price zones, fleet routes, customer profiles and competitive risk.
• Competitive Intelligence: Automate the monitoring and discovery of relevant location intelligence from news feeds, blog posts, social media, maps and imagery and more, allowing users to quickly filter results by place, time and topic for improved decision-making.
• Safety and Environment: Locate, analyze, mitigate and respond to a broad range of health, safety and environmental risks that are critical to meeting compliance requirements of regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
• Crisis Planning and Response: Aid first responders and security personnel in properly securing areas to prevent further damage and assess the situation to determine optimal containment steps.
Last year, TerraGo announced that Sentinel USA, an oil and gas utility industry GIS services and consulting provider, had enhanced the collection and dissemination of pipeline data with the deployment of its GeoPDF maps.
Sentinel USA produced intelligent, portable, interactive GeoPDF maps for its personnel to take into the field and add mark-ups and comments as part of pipeline assessments. The updated data is integrated back into a database, allowing Sentinel USA oil and gas customers to access the latest information specific to their pipeline assets by downloading GeoPDF maps depicting the most current data collected by field personnel.
This solution allowed the organization to streamline its entire workflow process of data collection, validation and the integration into it enterprise GIS to facilitate both internal and external collaboration.
George Demmy is chief technology officer at TerraGo Technologies. He is one of the patent holders for the process that creates georeferenced PDF files.
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