GIS and Petroleum Industry

Anirban Acharya
Software Engineer, Infotech Enterprises Ltd.
11, Software Units Layout, Madhapur, Hyderabad, India
Emil: anirban@infotech.stph.net, anibap@yahoo.com

The word “Geography” though not used often by us in our daily life, but it’s presence, reference and value has become an integral part of our activities in the way we do business, the way we communicate, the way we manage our resources and the way we live.

Our realization on the importance of Geography in our activities have led into the development of a full fledged Information system supported by cutting edge technology and research work undertaken by various organizations to bring in this power of “Where” to our life and business.

As we see in recent days technologies are converging in a rapid rate and the utilization of GIS technology by multiple disciplines across the organization is a common process to expand business and reach out to more customers providing quality service. We are into the age of Enterprise Wide GIS, which helps to solve

• Business problems
• Automate Business processes and
• New ways to analyze business and spatial data

by incorporating the knowledge of “Where” into the existing business models of “Why”, “What” and “When”.


Petroleum Industry – Need of an Integrated Business-GIS.
The use of geography in analyzing and making decisions is not a new thing in the oil and natural gas industry. A good understanding of geography is required in every step of a petroleum industry starting from locating a place to drill a well, route a pipeline from the exploration site to the refinery plant, finding an ideal location for a refinery and lot more. And all these procedures t rely heavily on geography in order to make intelligent business decisions.

The convergence of GIS and other technologies specially Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) with the support of spatial information via spatial cartridges has opened a new era which will allow to manage the spatial components of these everyday petroleum "business objects," such as leases, wells, pipelines, environmental concerns, facilities, and retail outlets, in the corporate database, and apply appropriate geographic analysis efficiently in a desktop-focused application.

Petroleum Industry -Scope of GIS integration and Applications
The petroleum Industry can be functionally divided into 2 categories.

1. Production and Refining Sector.
2. Retail Outlet Management and Distribution Network.

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