Eyes in the Sky, Ears on the Ground: Advances in remote sensing in the oil fields.

• Author: Simonelli, Isaac Stone
• Position: OIL & GAS

Byte by byte, technology is helping the oil and gas industry become more efficient, cost-effective, and safe. Advancements in remote sensing technology and their implementation allow oil and gas companies to collect higher quality data and act more precisely in the field.

"Using remote sensing, you can collect a lot more data a lot faster," explains Adam McCullough, the Alaska program manager for NV5 Geospatial, which specializes in light detection and ranging (LIDAR) mapping.

The laser-based remote sensing technology--deployed on autonomous vehicles, fixed-wing aircraft, and helicopters--can provide detailed topographic maps, lake-bottom maps, and vegetation data.

"We do a lot for the oil and gas sector in Alaska," McCullough says. "Mapping pipelines and infrastructure at high resolution, monitoring changes over time, seeing how pipelines move and subside, looking at how roads are being impacted by landslide risks and geotechnical hazards."

Having high-resolution mapping is mportant when a company is trying to model slight year-over-year changes in infrastructure, McCullough says. This is particularly important on the North Slope where the seasonal and yearly changes in permafrost are constantly reshaping the landscape.

"When you can map down to a couple centimeters, you can really start looking at year over year changes and trajectories," McCullough says.

If, for example, the mapping shows that a section of pipeline has subsided several centimeters in the last few years, a company can deploy a maintenance team to that area to prevent any further erosion or impacts to the infrastructure, McCullough explains.

"You don't want a pipe to burst or your facility to fall into a pond developing up on the Slope," McCullough says. "It's really a way of using the [increased] precision to model the entire network of infrastructure--hundreds of miles of pipes and gravel roads and facilities up on the Slope--and pinpoint the areas that are being put at risk."

"[LIDAR] is a cheaper unit cost," McCullough says, noting that what used to take an entire field season can be completed in greater detail in a week or two. "The processing becomes a lot faster, so the reporting becomes a little more immediate, and it becomes highly repeatable."

By running the same data collection processes year after year, clients can see changes in the landscape and infrastructure in greater precision. The highly accurate data also allows them to better model future changes.

"You're doing things smarter with remote sensing technology," McCullough says.

Previously, teams required complicated logistics, including bear guards, to collect this type of data in the field.

"They'd spend all summer on foot, measuring places where there's...