The Permian Basin is one of the most prolific Oil and Gas producing regions of the world and it is located in SE New Mexico and West Texas covering over 75,000 square miles. Geographically, this area is considered to be within the Chihuahuan Desert, which is one of the most biologically diverse deserts in the world. The first commercial well was drilled in 1921 and the region has seen boom and bust over the last 100+ years of production. With a long history of different drilling, extraction, containment and transfer practices, leaving the state with the task of remediation to remove all equipment left in place once the well stopped producing is understandably overwhelming. The orphan well program is a federal program designed to financially support states facing this costly issue. The New Mexico Oil Conservation Division (OCD) supports the regulatory oversight and management of oil and gas operations in the state. In 2022 OCD reached out to Elevate to ask how remote sensing technology could support the various remediation efforts they were addressing once an oil field is abandoned. An initial 4 square mile test area was selected as a pilot study area to demonstrate the efficacy of Elevate’s key services – high resolution remote sensing and data analytics. Shortly after the high resolution imagery was captured, a valuable deliverable was realized through a conversation and demonstration of the image quality. The question was what is the length of the flowlines within a select area. At first glance, this seems relatively simple, as the flowlines appeared black and easily recognizable from the background surface. When zooming out, it becomes overwhelming how much flowline there is across a relatively small area. Elevate leaned into its data analysis techniques and began developing a machine learning model to identify these features. Within a few weeks, there were some high quality results that OCD was excited about.
Over the next couple months, OCD requested Elevate to apply this methodology to 40 square miles of abandoned oil and gas fields in the Permian Basin. Typically data acquisition of this magnitude is passed onto an airplane, but Elevate developed highly efficient field methods to reduce the time required in the field substantially without reducing image quality. Once the data was captured Elevate only had 4 weeks to deliver the imagery and flowline data.