Oil deposits mapping using remote sensing / ground data and PCI Geomatics Technologies

Long-term experience in world practice has demonstrated that remote sensing essentially increases efficiency of oil and gas exploration. The main tool for remote oil prospecting is the landscape optical field investigation. A scientific background for the oil deposits detection is the interaction between optical radiance and land covers (vegetation, soils), which provides the relevant information about oil prospectivity of explored area.
The landscape over oil deposit is designated by local variations of different parameters. The geophysical, geochemical and biochemical anomalies existence within oil-bearing patterns considered as proved. Inside these patterns, the alternation of high and low mechanical stress zones, intensive heat, liquid and gaseous fluids transfer presents. The low mechanical stress zones correspond to affected filtration properties of rocks, acid reduction and oxidation processes are propagated. Thereof, in such zones, the anomalies of geophysical, geochemical, biochemical fields are occurred. Their presences, certainly, condition the soil over oil fields, change a microbiological environment and provide particular specifics for plants growth. Accordingly, the vegetative cover modifies the self physiological and, hence, the optical features.
In remote sensing, the vegetation and soils act as detectors/amplifiers simultaneously for search signals. Such detectors can recognize very low drivers of environment due to cumulative effect. Thus, the vegetative cover collects the integral information about environment. This information can be registered remotely by optical reflective contrast between objects and background.
Quantitative analysis of optical anomalies intensity over oil deposit has demonstrated that general remote sensing typically is not suitable for their registration. For instance, the radiometric contrast between anomaly and background in 0.4 – 0.9 µm spectral band does not exceed sensitivity threshold of available systems for the Earth observation. There is a problem to detect the low contrast anomaly sites over oil deposit. It is necessary to integrate the processing of remote sensing data with geophysical data and ground spectrometry data to solve this problem.
Paper discusses various approaches to use the geoinformation technology for the oil deposits mapping using PCI Geomatics software.
The source data are prepared in the first step. Source data includes the multispectral imagery, digital elevations, and ground geophysical data. All data spatial regularization is fulfilled in the second step. Subsequently, the raster data cube integration is executed. In the end the vegetation ground spectrometry is carried for oil deposit borders detection.
To handle data cube, an application is being developed using software technologies from PCI Geomatics. The application uses the source data ingestion and its processing along with correct parameters and command options. Processing parameters are chosen within graphical user interface, designed in Python Tk graphic library.
To conclude, state of the art PCI Geomatics technologies provide the required support for oil deposits mapping using remote sensing and ground data.