New Russian Gas Export Projects, Exprodat May 2016

Future-proofing Petroleum Infrastructure

While the price of oil, OPEC deal-or-no-deal with/out Russia, or climate change grab the headlines, here is the story behind the story: what if we couldn’t access however much oil there is left to produce?

Access to petroleum resources is a big issue, when you consider the geographies involved. For example just in CIS above, theodora.com posted 25,500 km. (15,800 mi.) on 23 mapped out of 154 pipelines routes… consider only 15% of the routes that go 2/3 of the way around the globe! The same site posts similar statistics for the North American network: 21,250km (13,000 mi.) in 16 mapped out of 110 pipeline routes referenced next (stats here).

Oil pipelines crisscross the United States, sometimes isolated and sometimes in dense networks.

Two distinct yet equally important issues exist here:

1. Populated areas have tight rules around HCA — High Consequence Areas re: proximity to public facilities — well explained in US DOT/PHMSA regulator fact sheet or in Digital Globe’s infomercial and elsewhere.
2. in remote and/or insecure areas depicted at top, the sheer amount of terrain to cover makes monitoring and surveillance very difficult — in terms of a) pipeline integrity over decades, b) hostile elements in the lately more variable weather, and c) political insecurity as natural resource assets are secured by local more than multinational entities — insights can be found, for example, in the CSIS article the basis of the map at top.

Help is at hand in what is called petroleum EO, Earth Observation, both as newly available drones and standard or new micro satellites.

A previous Medium post with EO expert Andrew Cutts outlines the new opportunities and limitations of UAVs or drones and new micro-satellites. After comparing and contrasting their applicability, it concludes that:

… High resolution images, better temporal coverage, large decreases in data storage and advances in GPU computing are making a strong case for large and small scale projects to adopt the new imaging abilities. It is envisaged that the cost of data collection will decrease over time, so now seems to be an optimal moment to look at UAVs and small satellites for building up surface information systems.

How does one invest in such projects over such large areas?

The petroleum seismic industry carries out multi-client studies: a seismic operator pre-sells to a number of petroleum operators a seismic survey as a means to explore a new region for suitability to petroleum exploration. Statoil for example invested heavily in offshore exploration of the Barents Sea via the Barents Sea Exploration Collaboration (BaSEC): sharing costs in a remote and expensive area helped them quickly address a strategically important region.

Statoil: We must explore and find, 20 August 2016

The suggestion here is to follow a similar scenario:

1. EO operators propose multi-client studies over a localized area of interest, typically the joint-venture a) operators of the pipeline infrastructure, b) exploration companies looking for oil, and c) government agency responsible for licensing exploration, production and distribution there
2. plan out a UAV and cloud-point program to rapidly draw up the pipeline and terrain infrastructure, regionally first then locally for installations
3. LINQ Ltd. can help not only plan out but consider what-if scenarios — combined IT, human resources, project management and budgeting — from which will be ascertained the necessary tools for satellite or UAV, LiDAR or image acquisition & processing to iteratively build infrastructure models of what is a) on-the-ground or b) planned before touching ground.

This briefly illustrates some ways and means to build up an image of the infrastructure for monitoring and surveillance — simply apply cross-over methodologies from other industries with similarly large and complex undertakings — and new techniques now give long-standing infrastructure prospects new opportunities to do so in an effective and timely manner.

Future-proofing petroleum infrastructure is now possible through new EO via UAVs and micro-satellites — they make current processes more affordable in scoping areally larger infrastructure projects.

This is what proponents of BIM, Building information Management, described in my Pulse post from an AGI show BIM: The Next Level last year. The basis isn’t new, the tools are:

1. start building up a comprehensive inventory of what is already in place
2. continue planning future infrastructure based on prior lessons learned
3. and finish monitoring affordable end-to-end infrastructure management

Please visit www.zolnai.ca if you wish to start a conversation on this key topic!