By Nina Lebedeva and Elena Smirnova, DATA+, Ltd.

The fuel and energy industrial complex is closely connected with other businesses that are widely represented in nearly all countries around the world. This industry, and particularly its oil and gas components, plays an important role in the economies of most highly developed countries. Oil and gas companies are in need of reliable data regarding industry operations at different processing stages and levels of organizational hierarchy.

GIS technologies provide a variety of tools for integration and analysis of this information, and an interest in using GIS for such practical and strategic needs is rapidly growing. The OAO LUKOIL Oil Company, based in Moscow, Russia, has completed such a GIS implementation. The project sought to provide management with a variety of tools for fuel market analysis, decision making process support, and planning projections.

The project's main goal was to integrate the dissemination of information among many different departments of OAO LUKOIL. This data included many aspects of company business and interests. Also, an enormous amount of raw statistical information needed to be entered into the system for analysis.

Following intensive study by OAO LUKOIL, DATA+, Ltd., Esri's distributor in Russia, was contracted as the GIS consultant. The first thing to be taken into account was the large degree of spatial data access available in the client-server technology. Client terminals were already equipped with ArcGIS Desktop 8 with the majority of cartographic, as well as thematic, information located on a corporate server running Oracle with ArcSDE.

All information was classified into four categories based on business process: production, transport, processing, and consumption.

These categories characterized OAO LUKOIL at four levels of spatial coverage and generalization: global, regional, Russia, and areas of company business interest. At each level a corresponding set of cartographic maps with numerous data layers was developed using ArcGIS. Maps included cartographic background and thematic content accompanied by metadata. The finished system is available not only for viewing and querying but also for editing and updating operations.

Annual statistical reports of oil and gas supplies, volumes of processing, and import-export structure in large energy consuming and/or producing regions served as sources for mapping at the global level. These maps not only allow users to overview information at the macroregional level but also to compare country trends in oil and gas resource processing and consumption to world tendencies over time. At the regional level, statistical data from oil and gas producing and consuming countries formed the basis for mapping in ArcGIS Desktop. The infrastructure of the oil and gas industry including supply regions (according to the United States Geological Survey [USGS] data), petroleum production and gas extraction centers, pipeline networks and sea terminals, and processing centers were also mapped.

More detailed information was presented for the oil and gas industrial complex of Russia. The database at this level includes a detailed topographical base (scale 1:1,000,000), oil fields, gas fields and gas condensate fields, licensed fields, information on locations of operating and projected oil, gas and oil product pipelines, pipeline serving stations and oil terminals, oil and gas processing companies, petrochemical businesses, and the petroleum storage depots and filling station network. These maps illustrate numerous and different aspects of the business processes that oil and gas companies employ.

For more information, contact Nina Yakovlevna Lebedeva, project manager, DATA+ (tel.: 7-095-254-9335, e-mail: nina@dataplus.dol.ru).