Objectives of the service
The development of new technologies and services in decommissioning and environmental management will be crucial in the coming years. The decommissioning activities need to increasingly consider space-based applications for a remote management.
KSAT DECOM will help decommissioning industry and operators in offshore Oil & Gas to achieve safer methods of execution, reduce costs and, of course, monitor the environmental impacts that these activities will have in the ocean and the fishing industry.
KSAT DECOM will help decommissioning sector with:
- NRT SAR-based oil spill detection service
- Designing an optimal program in terms of revisit time, resolution and information to proactively detect oil spills and vessels.
- Exploring the fusion of its current services with additional satellite data to detect other information such as methane emissions.
This approach is an innovative concept where different capabilities will be put together for the decommissioning sector as one package.
Users and their needs
KSAT DECOM targets two types of users; Energy companies and regulatory authorities. Stakeholder engagement has shown that the monitoring of environmental impact of the decommissioning activities is a priority for understanding what is happening before, during and after decommissioning activities.
The main needs identified are:
- Monitoring of the activities around the offshore platforms such as vessels or equipment.
- Rapid detection of oil spills during.
- Proactive monitoring of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and understanding impact of activity on local environment (e.g. water quality)
- Optimization of the decommissioning activities by reduce the costs.
Our vision is to provide this service worldwide whilst the demonstration mainly focused on key areas in Indonesia, North Sea and Mexico to the location and interest of the project stakeholders.
Service/ system concept
KSAT DECOM is a space-based service that provides high accurate vessel detection and oil spills monitoring around the decommissioned platforms as well as overall environmental monitoring detecting greenhouse gas emissions and water quality information around the assets.
Users can access the services through a single interface or via API that offers an agile and easy overview of the activities and phenomenon around their platforms of interest.
This service combines different KSAT Near-Real Time services with newly developed solutions for supporting decommissioning activities.
Space Added Value
The following list provides the space assets that are possible to use as part of DECOM, many of which were used as part of the proof-of-concept of this demonstration project:
- Sentinel-1: its capacity to cover wide areas makes it ideal for maritime applications. SAR images are extremely useful for such applications owing to their capacity to acquire images without long tasking windows and independent of good light conditions and cloud-free skies. It has proven to be cost-effective compared to other solutions (Ground-Based radar, thermal imaging, etc.).
- Sentinel-2: the constellation of two optical satellites that provide imaging opportunities over land and water with repeating image collections every 6-12 days. This constellation, with its 12 spectral bands, high resolution as well as wide swath allows for mapping of a wide range of features.
- Sentinel-3: provides daily imaging over an impressive 1,270km swath focused particularly on ocean colour. Sentinel-3 is ideal to support maritime applications, especially for water quality where Chlorophyll a can be used as a proxy for environmental condition.
- Sentinel-5P: first Copernicus mission dedicated to monitoring of the atmosphere. Its main objective is to perform atmospheric measurements with high repeat to be used for air quality, ozone UV radiation, etc. and as such is ideal for wide area monitoring of emissions, some of which can be associated with oil and gas activities and during decommissioning activities.
- Commercial SAR satellites: offer different spatial resolutions and coverage for targeted monitoring in the maritime and land domain and include RadarSat-2, Cosmo-Skymed, PAZ, TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, Iceye and Capella etc which complement the Copernicus satellites offered.
- Commercial optical satellites: constellations such as GHGSat have been designed specifically to quantify methane concentration and is therefore an ideal method for monitoring methane emissions from oil and gas operations as much as for monitoring the environment. In addition, high resolution optical data can also be used for more detailed analysis in and around decommissioning activities to support awareness and understanding
- Satellite-Based AIS: Real Time delivery of AIS data is of paramount importance in correlating oil spills with the responsible polluting vessel.
- High performance distributed Ground Station Systems for operational earth observation services, delivery of data in Near-Real-Time is critical to improve the response capabilities of the end users.
Current Status
The project completed in January. The primary focus was to understand the needs of the user to better define and build solutions of relevance to meet the needs and requirements for decommissioning activities. Space assets are typically not built with users and different market sectors in mind, so user engagement is critical to understanding the needs and ensure that the tools available meet the need as much as possible. This has been a critical component of the Demonstration phase where revisiting the requirements from the Feasibility as well as broadening the input from the Energy sector through new questionnaires and direct engagement made it possible to further refine requirements and led to more meaningful stakeholder engagement throughout the project highlighting the value of such services, especially as decommissioning activities are set to grow.
