USE OF REMOTE SENSING DATA IN SEARCHING FOR HYDROCARBON DEPOSITS

Abstract. For an oil-and-gas company, providing the right of use of the interiors is preceded by great efforts on economical substantiation of licensing's expediency. Lack of studies of new regions and limited access to the existing information result in a serious problem when substantiating the expediency of licensing of a new territory.

Estimates of presence of oil and gas on a new region can be performed on the base of complex analysis of widely available geological-geophysical and especially space (remote sensing, RS) data [1, 2, 3].

The advantage of using RS data is that they permit to obtain the unique information that cannot be retrieved by any other methods. Yet, they provide essential benefits in costs while searching for liquid hydrocarbons, ensuring, at the same time, efficient production of geological prospecting due to the use of innovative high-end technologies. Since RS methods, especially the landscape indicative ones, determine hydrocarbon geochemical anomalies observed in space images rather than the deposits themselves, they can be applied to any type of accumulations including unstructured fields. Aside from these, other methods such as analysis of spectral characteristics of images, determination of particular anomalies in the IR diapason, lineament analysis, as well as photogrammetric methods are also employed [4].

In this paper we show that the use of remote sensing data substantially reduces the costs of geological prospecting, in particular due to the localization of potentially perspective areas. We also demonstrate it to be extremely powerful from the standpoint of ecological monitoring and industrial safety of licensed areas, objects of development, and hydrocarbon transport.

REFERENCES

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3. Baranov Yu.B., Sokolovskiy A.K., Fedchuk V.Ya, On Some Issues of Regional Geology of Precambrian of Aldan. Procs. Russian Conf. “Methods of Remote Sensing Data and Space Information Processing,” Ryazan', Russia, 1989, pp. 81-82.

4. Baranov Yu.B., Grushin R.V., Kruchkova T.A., Baranova L.Yu, Feygin A.E., Aerospace Methods for Monitoring of Cryopedology Conditions of Northern Oil-and-Gas Deposits of YANAO. Procs. Workshop “GAZPROM: Maintenance of Safety of Infrastructure Objects on Permafrost Soil Territories,” Tyumen', Russia, 2002. Moscow, GAZPROM, 2003, pp.19-24.