Near-real-time monitoring of North American unconventionals activity from space | Oil & Gas

North American shale oil is a key swing factor in the global oil supply landscape, with production expected to exceed 11 million barrels per day by 2025. However, most of the data around shale oil and gas activities is estimate-driven and comes with a significant time lag.

Obtaining near-real-time information around well pad construction, drilling, and fracking activities up to two months ahead of public sources can give traders, investors, exploration and production, and oilfield services companies the edge they need to thrive in this high-stakes environment.

Using high-resolution satellite imagery, we can follow individual wells through their life cycle—from the new well pad construction and permitting stages to the drilling, drilled but uncompleted (DUC), and fracking stages. Combined with advanced analytics and publicly-available data, we are able to reveal complete and accurate shale oil and gas activity in the Permian Basin in near-real-time to bring unprecedented transparency to production outlooks.

The well lifecycle, as we monitor by satellite¹

Well pad construction

See well pads being constructed even before drilling permits are filed.

Drilling

Learn which wells are being drilled on each well pad and when.

Drilled but uncompleted

Follow the creation and lifetime of individual DUCs at their specific locations for a far more granular view than aggregated estimates by public sources.

Fracking

Base production forecasts on observed fracking activity reported more comprehensively and months before public sources.

^{1 Production not currently in scope}

How we help clients

Commodity traders

Anticipate short-term supply variations to build more accurate production models and execute trades ahead of the market.

Exploration and production companies

Optimize exploration and production geographic focus based on competitive analysis and synergistic opportunities.

Oilfield services companies

Leverage indicators of utilization to optimize inventory and pricing strategies and manage fleet size.

Financial services companies and investors

Assess operators’ financial and operational performance and estimate future revenues from production.

Our approach

To ensure the most accurate, complete, and up-to-date data set, we use a combination of:

Satellite imagery

Applying advanced processing capabilities to high-resolution optical images enables simultaneous monitoring of all target wells in any selected area

Advanced analytics

Combining image-to-data analytics with algorithms trained on historical observations enables the automated identification and tracking of new wells through their development stages

Public data scraping

Continuously collecting, cleaning, processing and normalizing publicly-available data (e.g., from state regulators) and contrasting it with our satellite imagery to identify and highlight inconsistencies

Our advantage

Timeliness

We observe events in near-real-time, often months ahead of the public sources that the market relies on.

Granularity

We can determine which individual wells or groups of wells on a given pad have been drilled or fracked.

High resolution

We use high-resolution imagery that can distinguish drilling and fracking events from other activity, as well as detect non-standard events.

Related insight

Blog Post

Monitoring the Permian basin using Earth observations

March 19, 2020 – A novel way to gain an accurate view of shale activity in close to real time is through the use of satellites. Remote-sensing capabilities have expanded rapidly, along with the commercial availability of high-resolution and very-high-resolution images.

Permian Basin activity monitoring