Case Study Middle East Oil Field Mapping
By using a combination of VHR QuickBird imagery, Landsat multispectral imagery and expert image interpretation Infoterra Ltd. were able to capture the complexities of several Middle East oil fields. This work was undertaken in several components and then brought together in a fully annotated report describing the quantitative results and highlighting subtle features which may be of significance such as remediated areas which at first may appear unaffected.
Infrastructure mapping was carried out at 1:2000 scale and included features such as roads, tracks, pipelines, buried pipelines, well pads and well heads (see above image). Each feature captured is quantified in terms of abundance, length or area so that each field can be quickly summarised by key attributes.
Ground contamination is very complicated in this environment due to a cycle of fresh oil spills, oil impacted soil forming ‘tarcrete’ of varying degrees and remediated regions. It is crucial to capture and quantify all of these states to fully understand the state of environmental impact the site has had. A combination of expert image interpretation and automated image classification was used to map the oil impacted areas and their severity (see image below). To improve classification accuracy Landsat thermal imagery was combined with the VHR optical imagery whereby suspected oil contamination shows high absorption in the visible part of the spectrum but shows anomalously high values in the thermal infrared. Expert image interpretation is used to map remediated areas which is crucial as this is typically oil impacted soil which is simply covered over the surrounding clean soil.
The results of this mapping were vital in due diligence decision making but the same technology could be applied to site monitoring.