Case Study: Nalcor Oil & Gas

Creating compelling intelligence with Visual Fusion®.

Nalcor Energy is a major energy and utility corporation in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. A Crown corporation, Nalcor is charged with leading the management and development of the province’s energy resources.
Current offshore oil and gas projects are concentrated in the Jeanne d’Arc Basin 200 miles (340 km) off the Newfoundland and Labrador coast, but more oil and gas discoveries may be waiting in other basins that are comparatively underexplored.

To find and deliver new resources in these basins, Nalcor Energy is executing an exploration strategy based on global best practices. Under this strategy, in 2010 the company invested in two scientific studies in the Canadian North Atlantic: first a satellite study of natural oil seeps on the ocean surface, then one of the largest seismic surveys ever done of the ocean floor. (Seismic data is the primary data used in exploration drilling decisions.)

As a result, Nalcor Energy has defined new areas that hold the potential for petroleum discoveries.

The Challenge

Nalcor Energy’s Exploration Department needed a system for managing the seismic data and other geoscience information it collects so that company knowledge and insight on the potential of these offshore areas could be captured, preserved and effectively communicated.
But seismic data is complex, and difficult for non-specialists to interpret in its native formats. The company also wanted to connect this data to other information it possessed: data about existing and planned wells and platforms, reports supporting geologists’ interpretations of the seismic data, and a system of scores assigned to the basins based on their potential. This diverse information resided in a huge collection of spreadsheets, databases, GIS files, and in industry-specific software that only a handful of Nalcor Energy’s employees could use.
To manage and present the data, the Exploration Department had created an interactive PowerPoint document. After a year and a half, it contained over 800 linked slides. And with more wells being drilled, and more seismic data on the way, it was growing.

“Just maintaining it was a full time job,” said Mike White, Geoscience Technologist for Nalcor Energy.

The Solution

At an annual conference, members of the Exploration leadership group viewed the Newfoundland & Labrador Oil & Gas Industries Association’s (Noia) East Coast Map, an interactive visualization of oil and gas activities in the Atlantic. The interactive map was created by consultants Tamarack Geographic Technologies, using IDV Solutions’ Visual Fusion. A new company, ICI Innovations, has since been established by Tamarack’s leadership to better provide data visualization solutions for clients across Canada using products from IDV Solutions.

Visual Fusion is a platform for building map-based solutions that organizations can use to increase strategic insight and make informed decisions. It unites information from multiple sources and systems on an interactive map, timeline, charts, and graphs, allowing users to navigate and analyze the information. Major corporations, including oil and gas companies, utilities, midstream companies, and others in the energy sector, use Visual Fusion solutions to connect diverse data and gain a comprehensive view of their operations.

On the Noia map, Visual Fusion lets users see the locations of basins, wells, and platforms; then sort and filter the information in multiple ways, and access related information on each map item. Clicking on an oil well, for example, lets users see depth, age, operating company, and amount of oil or gas produced. Seeing a Visual Fusion solution in action enabled Nalcor Energy’s Exploration team to envision a solution to their data challenges using a product that could leverage the work that they had already done.

“The Noia map gave us an idea of what was possible,” White said, “And we realized we could take it further.”
Nalcor Energy engaged its local IDV Solutions partner, ICI Innovations, to develop the solution. “Nalcor Energy has a tremendous amount of data,” said Corey Tucker, President of ICI Innovations.

“Data sharing was complicated, and search near impossible. It’s exactly the kind of challenge that Visual Fusion solves elegantly.”

Building on the work done by Nalcor Energy to develop a standards based collection of industry data, ICI Innovations worked with Nalcor’s
Exploration Team to develop a solution that addressed all of their needs.

“This provides much better management of our resources, both data and people. And with the click of a mouse button, anyone can use it.”
Mike White
Geoscience Technologist, Nalcor Energy, Oil and Gas

Benefits

Nalcor and its employees benefit through:

• A single, easy-to-access location for all information.
  • The Nalcor solution consolidates more than 20 layers of unique data, bringing together everything from geophysicists’ reports to well status and production figures. Users can filter and drill down through this data to find exactly what they want using easily understood controls like checkboxes and radio buttons. New data and data sources can be added to the solution with minimal effort.
• A quality user interface that enables compelling presentations.
  • The solution provides a compelling overview of Nalcor’s interpretation of possible oil and gas deposits, then lets users show the seismic data and analysis documents that support the interpretation. “I don’t know of anyone in our part of the industry using anything like this, where all the data can be shown on one map,” said White. “The ‘wow’ factor is big in presentations.”
• Integration of existing data sets and documents.
  • The solution integrated Nalcor Energy’s existing information from multiple sources, in multiple formats without requiring complicated data migration processes.

Canadian electric utility streamlines infrastructure analysis with GIS visualization.

Overview

Newfoundland Power leverages opportunity to improve Information Management with a rapidly implemented Visual Fusion solution.
With only a short period of time to work with a massive collection of data, Newfoundland Power chose Visual Fusion to manage the data from a survey of utility poles that was undertaken conjointly with the province’s primary telecommunications company in 2011. Using out-of-the-box features, developers quickly created an application that displays the location and characteristics of the more than 300,000 poles, enabling them to check the validity of survey results, and in the future making the data easily available to employees working in the field.

Situation

Newfoundland Power serves the majority of electricity consumers in Canada’s province of Newfoundland and Labrador, providing power to more than 243,000 customers on the island portion of the province. The company’s distribution lines are carried on approximately 300,000 utility poles, many of them with attachments from local telecommunications and cable television companies.

As part of a joint use pole agreement with the primary telecommunications company in the province, a survey was commissioned to determine the location, attributes, condition, and services attached for each pole. To confirm the survey’s accuracy Newfoundland Power was required to perform QA checks on a sample of poles. Without a tool to display poles and pole information geographically on a map managing this QA would be very challenging.

“They had no capability to review that data other than spreadsheets,” explained Corey Tucker, Senior GIS Consultant with Tamarack Geographic Technologies Ltd., a consulting firm engaged by Newfoundland Power. “It was really hampering them. They were unable to gain confidence in what was being collected.”

Solution

Even before the pole survey, Newfoundland Power had been investigating how it could benefit from the use of GIS technology. The survey offered an opportunity to further understand the potential value of GIS technologies in a real world situation. Working with its consultant, Tamarack, the company considered several alternatives for providing insight into the pole survey data, ultimately selecting Visual Fusion.

Visualizing the poles makes it easier to send field crews to the precise locations.

“Quick implementation was a big factor in choosing Visual Fusion,” said Tucker. “The goal was to get the application designed, developed, and deployed in six to eight weeks. Our hope was to use out-of-the-box features and minimize custom programming.”

Thanks to Visual Fusion’s robust feature set, the company was able to meet its goal. Instead of spreadsheets, a SQL Server 2008 database was deployed to contain the survey results. Through Visual Fusion’s SQL Server connector, end users can view and update the survey data.

In the company’s Pole Management application, users can see the exact location of each pole, its type, height, age, condition, ownership, and what services (cable, phone, or power) are attached. To direct field personnel to a specific structure, they can share a favorite view, or email an image created with Visual Fusion’s Label and Snapshot tools.

“Many of the end users at this company are not GIS experts. They’re familiar with consumer services like Google maps and Bing maps. The Visual Fusion application provides the possibility of an easy-to-use tool for everyone across the enterprise.

Newfoundland Powers’ Pole Management application gives users with no GIS experience easy access to location data, with no training needed.

Newfoundland Power and the telecommunications company will divide the poles into management areas, which users can edit and view in the application. By selecting any of these polygons, staff can do an instant spatial query to list the poles in the area, or view comprehensive reports by accessing SQL Server reporting services within Microsoft SharePoint. While nearly all of the application uses out-of-the-box features, the company elected to add custom code to calculate and display the average pole age and the number of poles for each service provider, a modification Tamarack was able to easily make for them.

With a single click, users can perform a spatial query on any pole management area

More out-of-the-box features let the company’s users filter poles in multiple ways, and display a graph of the distribution of poles by age.

An interface for everyone

In addition to rapid implementation, other factors influenced the company’s choice of Visual Fusion. A primary one was the Visual Fusion interface, which employees could use with little or no training.

“Many of the end users at this company are not GIS experts,” Tucker said. “They’re familiar with consumer services like Google maps and Bing maps. The Visual Fusion application provides an easy-to-use tool for everyone across the enterprise.”

Other factors were Visual Fusion’s array of data connectors and deep SharePoint integration. Because Newfoundland Power uses SharePoint extensively, many data sources in its IT infrastructure can be brought into the Visual Fusion solution quickly.

Users can filter data in multiple ways. Filters are enabled through configuration and require no custom code.

Conclusion

By choosing Visual Fusion, Newfoundland Power was able to perform QA of the pole survey findings, and provide its users with meaningful access to the pole survey results. Using mainly out-of-the-box features, Tamarack and the company implemented the application on time and employees could use it with no formal training. Thanks to its data connectors and available SDK, Visual Fusion also gives the company flexibility to solve many different problems in the future. Tucker indicated, “Visual Fusion has the potential to become the standard way anyone in this organization views spatial data”.