De Maximis Project Portal for Eagle Ford development

ESRI PUG presentation highlights use of environmental data in 500 well drilling program.

Speaking at the 2013 ESRI Petroleum User Group (PUG) in Houston last month, Angela Remer of De Maximis Data Management Solutions and Travis Faul (Edge Engineering) described work for a ‘confidential’ client on a cloud-based solution to land and environmental management in support of an ‘aggressive’ drilling and development program in the Eagle Ford shale.

The client was confronted with a 500 well drilling program and 200 miles of pipeline to lay, all of which required a major environmental/compliance effort. Drilling sites are governed by multiple stakeholder bodies from the EPA, the Advisory council on historic preservation, the US Army corps of engineers (responsible for water use) and many more.

A workflow was designed spanning initial subsurface location selection, permitting and finally, ‘collaborative’ staking—all to be completed within a time frame of a week or so per location. The workflow was underpinned with tailored field data capture and a cloud-based document management system. Mapping was key to the project—layers from national and state data sets were combined with client-specific facilities maps to enable desktop location assessments. These were sent out to field workers who used a combination of Trimble GPS devices and iPads.

The cloud at the heart of the system was De Maximis’ ‘Project Portal,’ a web based application, originally developed for environmental industry professionals. Project Portal is a secure repository for data, documents and schedules that provides team members with a common meeting place and tools (including GIS) to access and manipulate project data. The portal has halved the client’s staking effort and there have been no violations to date. The client now relies on Project Portal in emergency management planning. De Maximis leverages ESRI ArcObjects in its portal development. More from De Maximis, from Edge and from the PUG.

Click here to comment on this article

Click here to view this article in context on a desktop

© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.