EXPAND DEMAND – OIL & GAS AND DISASTER RISK FINANCING & TRANSFER

In recent years the need for real-time incident satellite imagery has grown within the oil and gas industry.  Following the Gulf of Mexico (Deep water Horizon) oil spill, it became clear that access to real-time satellite data, tasked within hours of an incident and used to inform critical decision-making, could have far-reaching impacts for oil & gas operators in their response to oil spill incidents. However, effective use of satellite imagery to help drive response decisions faces a unique challenge in the time it takes from collecting the first image of an area of interest, to a revisit pass of the same area of interest (16 days in the case of Landsat).  This is exacerbated in locations that are closer to the equator than to the poles.

The solution is therefore more access to satellites, resulting in non-reliance on a single provider to meet standard needs.  This demand for better access to mission-critical Earth Observation (EO) data has led to the ‘Expand Demand Oil and Gas’ project, created and funded by the European Space Agency (ESA). This project has been running within ESA since 2018, and has two key high-level requirements:

1. To meet a specific operational requirement of the oil and gas industry.
2. To establish generic EO capabilities within the oil and gas industry and showcase the capabilities of the Sentinel mission and the European EO service industry.

The benefit of this project to its end-users would be a service delivering relevant near-real-time EO data.  This would be provided by a dedicated portal, where information relating to a specific spill incident is gathered and presented in a clear and systematic way.  The information provided would cover:

• A timeline of available products from a range of providers.
• Predictions of future availability of products.
• Actual products wherever possible
• Derived services such as oil spill extent mapping.

To meet this challenge, the Oil and Gas Industry Earth Observation Response Portal (OGEO – ReP) has been developed.  This platform will assist oil spill responses by gathering, processing and displaying a wide range of relevant EO data, including:

• Satellite data products from a wide range of sources (free and commercial).
• Predicted acquisitions relevant to the incident.
• Derived products, e.g. Oil spill extent mapping, processed as a hosted service.
• Contextual background information, such as asset locations.

The scalability of the platform allows it to process large amounts of data in a spill event, allowing for the inclusion of swath prediction (to identify potential acquisitions of interest),the mapping of a spill event, and running of oil spill drift models to forecast the behaviour of the spill.  This is all presented via an intuitive graphical user interface (G