ENVIRONMENTAL APPLICATION OF HYPERSPECTRAL REMOTE SENSING: MANAGING LIABILITY IN AN AGE OF TRANSPARENCY

Successful and responsible oil and gas exploration in sensitive environments involves monitoring for potential environmental impacts across large geographic areas over the full life cycle of a lease property. Remote sensing, a tool widely used in geologic investigations and the oil and gas industry, can be a valuable new tool for monitoring and tracking environmental change. The technology is especially effective for regional, “big picture” environmental management of large leases that may be remote, highly diverse, and difficult to access using conventional environmental sampling techniques. The technology can also aid in prioritizing specific field projects such as locating unrecorded pits. In the current computerized “Age of Transparency” wherein satellite imagery of cities or remote deserts can be downloaded by anyone from the Internet, environmental remote sensing can play an important role in the modern petroleum industry. This paper specifically focuses on hyperspectral sensors and their application to support environmental management in the petroleum industry including vegetation/habitat mapping and oil detection. An example from the ChevronTexaco Overseas Petroleum (CTOP) operated Campo Boscan oil field in Venezuela is presented. Introduction The life cycle of an oil field can typically be upwards of 50 years. This period includes the time from initial field surveys through drilling, production, decommissioning, and final property disposition. The environmental management of such large, often ecologically diverse and sensitive environments requires monitoring and data collection techniques that are detailed, reproducible, capable of sampling hectare-sized areas, and reasonably priced. Further, as countries adopt stringent environmental standards, it has become increasingly important to document potential changes in the environment such as might be related to petroleum production or those due to human encroachment and natural change. The ChevronTexaco approach to managing all operations has always been to minimize environmental impact. Conventional environmental monitoring and sampling typically involves one or more field crews sampling soil, water, and other important media and submitting these samples to laboratories for chemical analyses. Often this requires obtaining access to property not owned or under lease, and does require that the project understand what the background condition is in the surrounding areas. The sampling process is usually iterative requiring multiple phases of field mobilization, analysis and reporting. Field-based surveys are costly, labor intensive, and because the sampling approach is “point-based,” the context of the larger ecosystem can be misunderstood. Remote sensing has been and continues to be a rapidly evolving field. The petroleum and minerals industries have used satellite-based sensors such as Landsat for over 30 years to map geologic structure, detect economic mineral assemblages and assist in the location of potential petroleum reservoirs. The current technology has moved to commercial airborne hyperspectral sensors capable of recording visible and infrared radiation. Mining companies that use the data to better understand their areas of interest currently own some of these sensors. The United States Geological Survey (USGS), other U.S. government agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and many international researchers are using hyperspectral data to *Presented at The 17 World Petroleum Congress, Rio de Janieiro, Brazil, 1-5 September 2002