Seabed survey datasets are assets of enormous value for offshore operators. Environmental, site, geo-hazard, debris and pipeline planning surveys catalogue features on and below the seafloor to support well planning, drilling and production operations – all expensive and potentially risky activities. Identifying hazards on the seafloor that can jeopardise these operations is of particular importance…
Read detailsPart of many data management projects is keeping a record of what files are where. Often this can involve creating a list in Excel of all files within a folder area. Doing this manually is impractical as, typing out the information takes a long time and of course can also be a demoralising task. A…
Read detailsWhy should we use GIS? This is probably the question we hear most often in our discussions with our petroleum clients. And it’s not just from those oil and gas companies who have yet to embrace GIS – we sometimes hear this from companies that have already invested considerably in supporting technology and projects, but…
Read detailsThe 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…
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