Last week I attended the ESRI Petroleum user group in London. I think just over 200 people attended. I missed last year’s event but I have been present at this regular event many times in the past. Many thanks to the organisers – they do an incredible job. Pleasingly, there were plenty of Earth Observation papers given and they were all of a very high quality.
This was also my first time presenting at the PUG. My talk was on “Earth Observation for Oil and Gas”. You can access the slides below.
I really wanted and hoped to convey the following three messages:
- That there has never been a better time to look at Earth Observation. So much data is now freely available (Landsat, Sentinels, Modis, Aster, SRTM), there is plenty of very low cost data (Rapid Eye, Palsar) and a huge amount of high resolution (and very high resolution) data available either today in archive, programmable or planned.
- EO4OG project is available to everyone today containing information about EO products that can address problems faced by the Oil and Gas sector. And that this information is perfectly suited to GIS, whether in a standalone GIS desktop project by project basis or a more distributed basis throughout the organisation.
- Just buying EO data as a base map is not maximising your investment (in fact ESRI serve up plenty of base maps that should completely cover this need). The huge amount of high quality data is allowing a new comprehensive approach to temporal analytics, to build terrain based intelligence fast and to extract information from the data and correlate that to existing information to measure performance of a project.
One of the big messages I got from the first day of the conference was the that a lot can now be done with web GIS out of the box. ESRI now has a huge array of interconnected tools that can integrate with existing commonly used organisational software (Excel being used here as the example). Their suite of apps for data collection looks pretty smart.
GIS and its value in Oil and Gas
I have also added another presentation that is a stripped down version of one that I have given many times previously. The audience here is for people working in Oil and Gas who have heard about GIS but are unsure about its applications. I have written about a couple of these in previous blog posts.
I don’t pretend that this covers everything, but I hope to have hit a few of the key areas. I am sure there are plenty of other applications. I am always looking to improve so if you feel I have missed anything let me know.
Many thanks to Planet for allowing me to show slides about their doves and to Terrabotics for the slides on satellite launches and Fort McMurray.