The history of oil production dates back to 1859 when Edwin L Drake drilled the world's first oil well at Titusville, Pennsylvania, USA. In India, The Assam Railway and Trading Co. Ltd. discovered oil in 1867 and in 1891 a refinery was set in Assam which was Asia’s first oil refinery. Oil and gas provide for 35% of India’s energy requirements. It is a critical input for industries like petrochemicals, fertilisers and energy. Currently only 30% of the India’s oil needs are met through domestic production with the balance being met through imports.
Nearly everything related to petroleum business now is being measured and captured as digital data. Petroleum companies have conventionally invested in information technology (IT) over the years, throughout their business operations. Oil companies have realised that many of their critical business functions are inherently spatial in character.
The challenge for the oil and gas industry is to deal with three basic queries.
• Where to drill a well?
• How to route a pipeline?
• How to do asset management and logistics tracking, etc
Geographic information has a role to play in nearly all aspects of petroleum business and today we can see a drive towards enterprise technologies as petroleum companies are integrating spatial data in the business processes. Oil companies have learned to use GIS within each of these business processes to increase business efficiency, improve decision making and generate extra revenue.
Enabling GIS in a oil and gas production company is always a difficult task as it deals with a wide variety of data, coming from different disciplines, indulging a diversity of clients, following specific organisational norms, procedures and products that must guarantee additional expectations in terms of exploration opportunities. However, GIS has accepted the task of integrating and managing various complex and disparate data types. But more than that, GIS has become even more advanced in areas of complex geoprocessing, support for business intelligence models, real time global visualisation tools, automated cartography and data publishing.
