Objectives of the service
ExAM is an oil-market intelligence platform designed to reduce information asymmetry around refinery operations that are otherwise difficult to observe in real time. It combines high-resolution optical satellite imagery with complementary alternative data sources and advanced analytical models to generate independent, asset-level operational intelligence.
Through multi-source data fusion, ExAM identifies and contextualises changes in refinery activity, including maintenance, operational disruptions, restarts and shifts in processing-unit utilisation. The resulting dataset provides a timely, independent view of refinery status and throughput implications globally, enabling users to assess potential impacts on crude demand, product supply and regional balances before these are reflected in operator disclosures or conventional reporting channels. This approach moves refinery monitoring beyond static observation, towards more predictive, decision-relevant operational analytics.
Users and their needs
ExAM provides independent, near-real-time operational intelligence for global oil-market participants, including crude and products traders, analysts and risk managers. It addresses the limitations of conventional refinery monitoring, which can depend on delayed company disclosures, national-agency reporting and local market intelligence.
Using satellite-derived observations, ExAM converts asset activity into structured indicators of refinery and upstream operational status. These support early identification of maintenance, unplanned outages, restarts and potential throughput changes, helping users assess implications for crude demand, product supply, regional balances and supply-chain risk.
Key users include oil majors, trading houses, banks and national oil companies; hedge funds and other investors; refinery owners and operators; and governments, asset managers, consultancies, airlines and utilities. Applications include market surveillance, supply-chain response, investment diligence, risk management, commercial optimisation and scenario analysis.
ExAM delivers analysis-ready datasets through a near-real-time digital platform, making complex remote-sensing outputs accessible to both specialist market users and non-technical decision-makers.
Service/ system concept
For each monitored asset, ExAM produces continuously updated, unit-level operational-status time series, with a model-derived confidence score assigned to every observation. Coverage includes crude distillation units (CDUs), residual fluid catalytic cracking units (RFCCs), on-site power generation and other process units with identifiable, persistent thermal signatures.
Unit-level outputs are aggregated into an asset-level status assessment, enabling users to differentiate refinery-wide changes from unit-specific maintenance, outages and restart activity. Before publication, detections undergo automated quality-control and robustness checks covering signal integrity, temporal persistence, spatial attribution and consistency with the wider asset operating profile.
ExAM is delivered through two synchronised access layers. The browser-based dashboard enables users to interrogate asset and unit status histories, including associated confidence metrics, without technical integration. The REST API provides the identical validated, version-controlled time series in machine-readable form for ingestion into proprietary models, quantitative workflows, risk systems and operational dashboards. Both channels draw on the same pipeline and update schedule, ensuring a consistent operational view across all users.
Space Added Value
ExAM’s objective is to establish an independent, high-frequency and globally consistent source of operational intelligence for oil markets. By reducing reliance on delayed disclosures, fragmented reporting and local intelligence, the platform is designed to improve transparency, strengthen supply-demand assessment and support more efficient market decision-making.
This capability is built on two core pillars:
-
Satellite-derived asset monitoring
Systematic exploitation of optical satellite imagery, including Sentinel-2 and complementary sensors, to detect and quantify thermal activity at energy assets. These observations are processed into unit- and asset-level indicators of operational status, maintenance activity, outages and restarts.
-
Integration with EA’s analytical infrastructure
Incorporation of ExAM-derived operational datasets into the Energy Aspects analytics platform, where they are contextualised alongside proprietary market balances, asset intelligence and supply-chain analysis to produce actionable oil-market insight.
Current Status
ExAM is operationally monitoring 90 refineries and approximately 180 process units, generating asset- and unit-level status indicators as new satellite imagery is processed. The current coverage provides analysts and market participants with timely, independently derived evidence of refinery activity, outages, maintenance and restart events.
Product development is being iterated with five major industry players, whose feedback is informing refinements to data presentation, confidence metrics, asset navigation and API/dashboard workflows.
Work is now focused on validating and onboarding the next group of refinery assets, improving unit-level thermal-signature coverage and strengthening quality-control processes as the monitored universe expands. The next delivery phase will increase coverage to at least 120 refineries globally, prioritising assets with the greatest relevance to crude and products market balances.
This section will be updated following material delivery milestones, including coverage expansions, beta-release updates and formal system test events.
