The annual Esri Petroleum User Group Conference (or PUG for short) is now called the Esri Petroleum GIS Conference and is being held again in Houston, Texas, April 30–May 2, 2012. I’ve been travelling to the conference from the UK on and off for around ten years now, and it’s worth the trip because the…
Read detailsGeoreferencing images such as scanned maps are a common way of importing legacy or paper map data. However, sometimes vector based illustrations are required to be imported into GIS; often these vector drawings have no reference data. When these unreferenced data are added into ArcMap using the ArcGIS Data Interoperability extension they will, by default locate…
Read detailsAs oil and gas companies upgrade their ArcGIS applications from ArcGIS 9 to ArcGIS 10, we often get asked about the key changes in ArcGIS Desktop. To me one of the biggest changes between the two versions is in setting up the editing workflow. In the example below, I have a scanned map containing two geological…
Read detailsMapping gas hydrate occurrence in permafrost regions using a play fairway mapping approach. I have recently become very much interested in the subject of gas hydrates and have started, in my spare time, to do some research on this really interesting subject. I am by no means a gas hydrates scientist, but being a geologist…
Read detailsGIS technology has been used in ‘conventional’ petroleum for many years and is now being used increasingly in the development of continuous ‘unconventional’ resource plays such as shale gas, shale oil and coal bed methane. This makes a lot of sense – most (if not all) of these resources are located onshore and GIS’s ability…
Read detailsCultural data which E&P organisations rely on for exploration and commercial developments is ever-changing by nature. Status of leases change, as do company equities and stakes in existing and new blocks, number of wells and information about production. Typically, cultural data is made available by the data suppliers as regular updates, often in an unstructured…
Read detailsOne of the many questions that I get asked when delivering a GIS training course is “how do you enhance images – online background mosaics are good for general display but in a frontier basin study area, how do you process images to enhance surface features?” Most petroleum GIS users use remotely sensed imagery as…
Read detailsAs more and more oil and gas companies search for opportunities in the unconventionals sector, it is becoming increasingly critical to acquire good acreage. Charlotte Elliot, our 2011 Imperial College Petroleum Geoscience MSc student has recently spent a couple of months proving a workflow for doing just this – for the Candian province of Alberta. Her project aims were…
Read detailsWe often use ArcGIS Desktop’s buffer tool simply to select areas within set distances from a feature or features we are interested in. However, buffering can be used in more complex ways such as to produce a set of concentric buffers – this can be useful when looking at suspected migration of petroleum away from mature kitchen…
Read detailsExciting times here at Exprodat as we prepare to release a new software tool for the “unconventionals” market. In anticipation of this I thought I’d provide a sneak preview of what’s coming… Unconventionals Analyst is a well planning and reserve forecasting application for unconventional resource projects. Unconventionals Analyst was developed in partnership with a leading global…
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