Kenneth “Bud” Pope’s big-picture approach surpasses his view of the Flatirons in the foothills of the Rockies from his company’s Boulder, Colo., headquarters. Or even the perspective offered by the orbiting WorldView-1 satellite that transmits him data from 308 miles above.

Pope’s company, Spatial Energy, boils down continually transmitted data from satellites and other aerial or underwater sources, creates analyses and then delivers information that allows oil and gas workers to take action and solve problems, no matter how remote their location. The big picture, in this case, appears on the small screen.

“We take a lot of different types of datasets that the oil and gas enterprise uses throughout its life cycle, and we serve that up in a format that the customer can consume very easily at the desktop level,” Pope told Midstream Business. The options in terms of datasets and ways to combine and receive them make Spatial Energy’s service akin to a Netflix for the global energy industry consumer.

“There are a number of different-use cases within any of the big oil companies—Shells or Exxons, new ventures, exploration, midstream or pipeline, drilling, environmental or security—and each one of those types of customers in a big oil and gas company have different requirements for what they want to see or what they need to do their jobs,” Pope said.

“So they may come in and say, ‘I need an image over Angola or South Texas,’ and we go out and we do a search for them, and we come up with a number of different alternatives for imagery. We’ll take that imagery and put it into our system and serve it to that enterprise on an enterprise-wide level that can be used on any desktop at Exxon or Shell or Conoco or Chevron or any of our big customers,” he added.

Shale play challenge

A big challenge brought on by the rapid development of shale plays is communication with people in remote areas without wireless connectivity. For Spatial Energy products, it’s generally not a problem.

“Mobile is very popular in the oil fields where you have trucks and you have surveyors and people need to know what’s going on out in the field,” Pope said. “You have to be able to download and cache the data locally, which in a lot of mobile applications is not the case. Ours is pretty well tailored to really remote, disconnected oil fields.”

Pope’s images aren’t just useful for drillers. Those in the midstream sector benefit, too.

“There are a number of different applications for a midstream operator,” Pope said, and it’s not restricted to detecting leaks in existing pipelines with infrared sensors. Midstream customers rely on remote sensing during planning stages as well.

Among the concerns, Pope added, are “where that pipe’s going to go, what the elevation model is like—does it have to go over a ridge or a river? Elevation information is important for a lot of pipeline operators. So there’s the planning phase of route optimization, including what’s on the ground already, and then there’s the monitoring phase of what can you see that might be leaking or causing an issue in that pipeline.”

Vegetation analysis is a significant part of Spatial Energy’s business. Infrared sensors help in detecting change in vegetation that could be caused by leaking natural gas or ethane. Eyes in the sky provide a huge advantage to companies keeping track of extensive pipeline networks.

New owners

Spatial Energy was recently acquired by DigitalGlobe, a growing Colorado-based space-imaging provider with headquarters near Denver. DigitalGlobe provided many of the images that were instrumental in attempting to locate the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the south Indian Ocean and is a contractor with the U.S. Department of Defense. The company’s market capitalization is around $2.1 billion.

For Spatial Energy, DigitalGlobe is the ideal partner to grow the business.

“We had a number of inquiries,” Pope said. “We’re a strong, viable business and have been for eight years. DigitalGlobe is an ideal partner for us in terms of growth. We’re not the kind of company that got to a certain point and decided that we wanted to disband and move on. We really were looking for a partner that would help us grow to the next level as a company. DigitalGlobe, from a number of factors, meets that need not just in terms of distribution, but technology, people and resources. And from a cash capital growth standpoint.”

Several members of the Spatial Energy staff, including Pope himself, have worked for DigitalGlobe, so familiarity with the new parent company will help to speed the corporate integration, Pope said.

Growth in Asia

Spatial Energy employs about 35 worldwide, with offices that include corporate headquarters in Boulder; and offices in Plano, outside Dallas; Beijing and Vienna. Other staff members work remotely in Houston and throughout Europe to service customers worldwide. A key area of growth has been the Asia-Pacific region, particularly China.

“The first office that we opened at Spatial Energy was our Beijing office” in 2006, Pope said. “It’s been a very fast-growing business for us. We service most of the major Chinese oil and gas companies—Sinopec, Petrochina, CNOOC—those kind of operators, so it’s been a good business for us over there.”

Large companies have the resources and breadth of operations to have been able to put Spatial Energy’s products to good use.

“Most of the supermajors are our customers,” he added. “Most of the large independents are our customers. We tend to focus on customers that operate globally, although there are some that operate only in the U.S., Canada, the Middle East or China. Our systems and our data are applicable from the small operators all the way up to the supermajors, but most of our service and marketing focuses around the larger operators.”

Shale infrastructure expansion

The North American boom in oil and gas unconventional production has kept the company busy as well.

“Any time that you have a lot of men and machines on the ground, the complexity of the decision process is greater and greater,” Pope said. “Remote sensing can actually streamline a lot of the operations in the field in terms of speed and cost reduction. There’s a lot of optimization possible with midstream pipeline pads, including optimal pad location.

“It’s been quite a boom in North America for remote sensing because it helps minimize having feet on the street when you can do some of those scouting operations from the sky.”

Benefits of bigness

Support from a larger enterprise like DigitalGlobe will allow Pope’s people to branch out and develop new products for the energy industry.

“We’re entering into a phase where we do speculative maps,” he said. “Most of the work so far has been on a project-level basis, but we’re considering some wider areas of speculative collects and mappings and really selling the analysis of some of that information, which I think is going to be the next phase of growth. I think some of the technology can be applied in large areas with multiple customers.”

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