A GIS Approach to Mapping Onshore Support Infrastructure for Deepwater Gulf of Mexico Oil and Gas Operations

Author: Keith A. Long
Organization: Louisiana State University

One East Fraternity Circle
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
USA

Phone: (225)388-4538
Fax: (225)388-4541
keith@enrg.lsu.edu

The National Environmental Policies Act (NEPA) requires federal agencies to examine the environmental implications of their actions. This responsibility extends to the Minerals Management Service (MMS), a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Interior, which is responsible for managing the mineral resources of the outer continental shelf in an environmentally sound and safe manner and to timely collect, verify, and distribute mineral revenues from federal and Indian lands. A large portion of work involved in preparing offshore tracts for lease sale is the preparation of environmental impact statements (EISs), which are required under NEPA. Allocating offshore activity to onshore economic areas, however, has been problematic for the MMS since there has been little prior work documenting specific relationships between offshore tracts and onshore areas. As offshore activities become more contentious, particularly in frontier areas like the eastern Gulf of Mexico, understanding the specific nature of economic activities and articulating these impacts to the public become increasingly more important.

The goal of the project is to create and document the existing petroleum-related infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico through an extensive literature review of existing facilities, site identification, and location verification. Relevant oil and gas infrastructure includes transportation facilities, marine terminals, crew and supply bases, refineries, platform fabrication yards, pipelines, waste disposal facilities, and water and wastewater treatment facilities. All verified support infrastructure will then be incorporated into an enterprise scale Spatial Database Engine (SDE) and Web-based GIS. As part of the project implementation, a large-scale GIS is being designed to encompass the enormous amount infrastructure data available for the gulf. The GIS is being created using geocoded address matching, satellite imagery, and GPS coordinates. The entire GIS project is being created using Esri's SDE with Web-based visualization of the data using Esri's ArcView IMS and MapObjects.