Known for its innovative approach to business in the oil and gas industry, the OMV Group, headquartered in Vienna, Austria, has begun implementing an Esri-based enterprise GIS solution in its worldwide offices.

OMV was founded in 1956 and is central and eastern Europe's leading oil and gas company. It has approximately 6,200 employees in 28 countries and annual revenues in excess of seven billion Euros (8.6 billion U.S. dollars). OMV's four main businesses are refining and marketing, exploration and production, natural gas pipelines, and industrial and agricultural chemical refining and distribution.

Geological structure of the Vienna Basin Miocene horizon (two-way time structure map), wells, and faults.

The company recently signed a Multinational Enterprise (MNE) agreement with Esri as a basis for its enterprise GIS. OMV management believes that adopting global standards by using Esri's GIS software will allow data consolidation, facilitate data and information exchange between its offices, and provide a better global solution for the organization.

"We are using ArcGIS in our Exploration and Production (E&P) Division to produce maps for geological field studies, seismic survey planning, management overview, and reporting spatial information to government authorities," states Dr. Achim Kamelger, who is responsible for the planning and implementation of the GIS by the Geotechnics Department of the E&P Division. "We are working to integrate data from various E&P databases and petroleum specific applications into the GIS. ArcIMS is used to provide thematic maps to management and our overseas offices."

OMV E&P is currently moving its spatial data into the Public Petroleum Data Model (PPDM) and plans to develop scripts to automatically extract concession maps, seismic coordinates, well data, and production charts from the database.

Esri's ArcSDE technology assists with the construction of spatially enabled petroleum data stores that support both the PPDM and Petrotechnical Open Standards Consortium (POSC) models. Linking relational data from the PPDM with a GIS gives geoscientists the ability to query and display PPDM and other features on a map efficiently and retrieve specific information about them. These features include well locations, permit details, facilities, etc.

OMV is implementing its GIS in various E&P ventures. Other divisions, such as Surveying Service and Environmental Protection, and Health, Safety, Environment and Quality Management, and Facility Management Departments are also examining ways in which GIS could benefit their daily work.

OMV is using ArcSDE software to manage a geodatabase that integrates spatial data from various systems and distributes that information throughout the organization. ArcGIS Desktop software is used as a front end to its system and uses standard metadata, symbols, and a geodatabase structure. OMV will evaluate WebOffice from SynerGIS Informationssysteme GmbH, Esri's Austrian distributor. WebOffice is an ArcIMS software-based application and is used, via the Internet, for the distribution of maps and data throughout OMV's offices worldwide. This will increasingly provide the company with a single point of access and standardized mapping of all its significant assets.

"Petroleum companies deal with many types of spatial data, and GIS technology is vital to our business," says Kamelger. "It offers the possibility to manage and link the different data types for exploration, such as surface geological studies, seismic surveys, subsurface information and cross sections, well locations, and remote sensing data."

Concludes Kamelger, "I believe that GIS will continue to gain importance in the oil and gas industry. The amount of spatial and nonspatial data is growing exponentially. At the same time, the industry requires increasingly faster management, analysis, interpretation, and distribution of that data. Only by using an enterprise GIS solution can data be managed in an integrated and effective way. In the future, the industry needs to make some major improvements in handling large 3D data sets and a better connection to E&P specific applications. The recent development of the interoperability extension is a significant step in this direction because it allows fast and flexible integration of other file formats into the GIS environment."

For more information, contact Dr. Achim Kamelger, Geotechnics Applications and Project Support, OMV Exploration and Production GmbH (e-mail: achim.kamelger@omv.com, Web: www.omv.com).