When interacting with the world around us on a daily basis, it feels like most features are mapped: our city centers and the surrounding communities, the recreation areas near cities and even some of the well-known and explored far-flung areas. But remote parts of the globe still hold mysteries to be explored and mapped.

Oil and gas companies are regular explorers of these hard-to-reach areas, searching for new ventures—or locations to fuel their operations. The process of finding, evaluating and setting up new locations is often a significant investment for energy companies. Vantor's spatial intelligence can help these companies expedite the expansion of their prospecting operations.

Exploring new ventures

Energy companies may consider many different sites at once when looking for new zones of operation. They will remotely plan where to go, how to get there and do an initial assessment of a site’s viability. Vantor's spatial insights can inform each part of this process:

Oil and gas companies can leverage the Vantor Hub to task and examine fresh, very high-resolution satellite imagery of the sites under consideration. Maxar’s Vivid Terrain product can also be streamed via the Hub for terrain analysis and mapping in the exploration phase.

These data layers enable geomatics and analytics teams at these companies to conduct right-of-way assessments, determine what infrastructure exists around the sites and what needs to be constructed, and optimize seismic surveys.

Vantor's Human Landscape product provides insights into international geographic areas that will help on-site crews be better prepared for their arrival in the area: What type of facilities and roads are in the area? What languages are spoken? What are the local demographics and geopolitics?

Having this information ahead of time allows the crew to avoid possible missteps with the local community. This screenshot shows the Human Landscape dataset generated in November 2024 over the Ras Lanuf Refinery in Libya.

Evaluating a site for selection

Once initial assessments and exploration are done at a new ventures site, an energy company needs to determine what actions need to happen to turn the selected site into an operational site and if those actions fit within their budget and strategic plans. This involves considering factors such as possible locations for well pads, pipelines and refining facilities, offices and roads, and if that infrastructure already exists or needs to be constructed. Vantor's spatial insights can help inform these decisions:

Vantor's Building & Road Change product calls out what changes have occurred at a specific area between two timeframes. This information can help an oil and gas company quickly understand how an area of interest’s development has been shifting over time and determine if it’s energy-related change, such as from competitors, or residential or commercial development.

By tasking new imagery of the areas of identified change, companies can get a current view of what’s happening at the site and establish a continuous monitoring program to understand how the site changes as the seasons change.

In this example above, the image location from the previous gallery is noted with a blue map pin and the orange vectors call out changes near that site from 2024 to 2025, focusing a customer’s attention on the newly developed neighborhood (bottom left) and structural changes along the main road (upper right).

Vantor's Vivid Terrain maps provide an immersive 3D look at the Earth that can help an oil and gas company with construction- and risk-related assessments. You can leverage Vivid Terrain to understand the terrain it’ll need to traverse to reach a remote site and create reliable construction estimates if they need to build roads.

Once on-site, it’s likely that some areas will need to be leveled out, which can be an expensive task. Vivid Terrain Digital Elevation Models can help an oil and gas company determine the volume of dirt that will need to be moved in or out to create level sites for well pads, enabling them to compare potential costs of these activities between different sites to inform their site selection.

Site planners can also leverage our Vivid Terrain Digital Terrain Model, shown in the image above, for flood risk modeling to answer questions such as: If a spill happened at this site, where would the oil run and gather? If the site floods or they hit a water table during drilling, where can they store that water safely?

This rendering of the Digital Terrain Model with hillshade symbology shows elevation changes across the bare ground, allowing site planners to understand potential collection sites. The map pin highlights the area of the image from the previous gallery.

Vantor's Spatial on Demand product enables energy companies to combine Maxar’s satellite imagery with proprietary data—such as drone data or ancillary project data like local permit leasing boundaries—to create a common operating picture that can be shared with all employees, including surveyors, geologists, geophysicists, engineers, landmen and security teams.

This April 22, 2025, image of the drilling area in the Permian Basin reveals that a new drilling site has been constructed. These data layers can be viewed through Vantor's software or streamed in your enterprise’s preferred GIS application, like Esri’s ArcGIS shown above.

Enacting extraction planning and construction activities

After a thorough evaluation of possible new ventures sites, an energy company will select which site(s) to develop and finalize construction plans and obtain permits. Vantor's site monitoring solution, which combines automated tasking and advanced analytics, can be leveraged as crews arrive on site and start construction to monitor materials arriving and keep an eye on environmental impacts.

Vantor's site monitoring solution runs a car detection model on the new drilling site’s location; on the left, the car detections are shown as blue boxes in the WorldView Legion image from April 3, 2025, produced at 15 cm HD resolution. When the detection model is run on the six images collected as the site was being built, the detections demonstrate the increase in traffic during construction and the start of operations. When this monitoring technique is applied across a wide operational area, it allows an energy customer to quickly detect traffic trends and spot any unusual or unexpected activity.

Empower decision making with Vantor's spatial intelligence

As energy companies explore and map remote parts of the globe, Vantor's industry-leading satellite imagery, analytics and services can help you save time and resources as they navigate through each stage of the exploration, evaluation and construction process for setting up new ventures.