During this decade, the GIS (geographical information system) has gradually become an essential product among deliverables of survey projects reports not only in the oil and gas market, but also for many other offshore and onshore construction and civil projects.
Why GIS?
Our clients noticed that they needed their data to be stacked together in an interactive map that includes all sorts of natural and man-made features categorized in a comprehensive user-friendly database. This in return, saves a lot of time and effort in their planning studies.
Proactively, in 2008 Fugro SAE started to build a specialized department for GIS by extensive training and hiring specialized expertise.
After successful GIS system products delivery and database monitoring through our contracts with GUPCO, BP, Burullus/ Rashpetco and other major clients, Fugro SAE now maintains a comprehensive database that contains data from all the survey and positioning activities carried out by FSAE together with third-party data as appropriate. The GIS allows fast and easy production of charts that includes information such as bathymetry, seismic profiles, surface and mapping data including pipelines, platforms and other features.
Info Query
Fugro SAE uses ArcGIS for data management. All projects that are carried out are stored in our GIS and the information can be used instantly. The Geographical Information System has been developed over the past years by our specialized team. All previous Fugro SAE projects have been loaded into the database which allows the survey data to be queried for information such as names and types of pipelines, areas of environmental interest, platform types and operator’s concession names and particular seabed features. A thematic map has a table of contents that allows the reader to add layers of information to a base map of real-world locations.
The combination of geophysical, geotechnical and all other geospatial aspects of an offshore development in a GIS provides a powerful framework in which to visualise the datasets. By combining data from multiple disciplines in a common framework, correlations between datasets can easily be drawn and relations between data understood.
Site characterisation made easy
Integration of datasets in this way, combined with the understanding of the offshore environment from geological and geotechnical perspectives, provides the beginning of a site characterisation process, with the typical output of such a process being a geotechnical and geological ground model. Fugro uses its global expertise to create site-specific ground models, drawing inputs from the project GIS database and creating ground model output layers to feed back into the GIS.
Once the understanding of a site is formed in this way, the value of a project-specific GIS with an integrated ground model can be exploited to optimise future data acquisition programs, plan facilities and infrastructure and derive inputs for preliminary engineering, using the GIS as a predictive tool for the ground conditions across the site. The below diagram gives an example of a data driven GIS environment, data can be viewed both geographically and in a linked tabular format, queried and plotted.
Integration of Survey results
The below image is an example of seabed bathymetry, derived from high resolution geophysical survey data, overlain by an interpreted soil province map, which is a typical GIS-ready output from site-specific ground modelling, incorporating geological, geotechnical and geophysical analyses.
In the near future, survey data will be loaded into the GIS and then the geophysical data will be available for view through internet web pages.
Summary:
Fugro SAE can provide the Client with survey information and geophysical data in shape files, personnel geo-database and file database in a format that allows the user to easily control, query, analyse, edit, display and distribute the data and information. Fugro SAE can manage the database in-house and send data to be viewed using appropriate reader software.
By Fugro
