Find the leak that never reached water.
Spill Detection screens a lease for the dead-vegetation halos and stained soil that mark a release on dry ground, from multispectral imagery, and hands you a ranked list of places to send a crew.
- Stained soil at the release
- Dead vegetation
- Stressed vegetation, fading out
- Background ground
- GSD
- 0.5–2 m
- Cadence
- Event driven
- Platform
- High-res satellite
- Spectral
- Multispectral
01The job today
What catches a release on dry ground
A sheen on a creek gets reported. A sensor downstream trips. A release that soaks into a pad or a flowline corridor does neither, so it waits for a person to be standing in the right spot. That person is a pumper on his usual route, a landowner out checking cattle, a surveyor, or the field walk scheduled for next quarter. Until then a seep at a tank battery can run quietly while the dead ground around it spreads.
Then the call comes, or the crew finds a bare patch, and the compliance lead starts working backwards. When did it start? How much got out? Was a notification due under the state's release reporting rules, and is it now late? The field walk is the right tool once you know where to look, and the landowner's phone call tells you where one patch is. Neither tells you about the second patch on the far side of the lease, or the lease you just acquired and have never walked end to end.
Spill Detection adds a look from above before the boots go out. It reads the whole lease for halos and stained ground and ranks where they look strongest, so the walk starts at the top of a list instead of at the gate.
02What you get
What comes back from a screening
One delivery per screening request, in files your GIS and incident log already open. On a pilot, that covers the lease or field boundary you pick.
- 2.1
Ranked candidate listCSV
Locations ordered by how strong the halo or stain signature is, with coordinates your crew can load into a GPS. It lands in the compliance lead's walk plan, so the first stop is the strongest candidate.
Limit 01A candidate is not a finding
The list ranks places where the ground looks like a release. A crew has to confirm each one. Some will be a release, and some will be something else.
Limit 02Other things kill grass too
Drought, a vehicle track, a herbicide pass, livestock and a wet low spot can all leave a bare patch. A ranked candidate may turn out to be any of them.
- 2.2
Stress signature mapGeoPackage
For each candidate, the area where the multispectral bands show vegetation stress or changed soil, drawn over the lease. It opens in ArcGIS or QGIS next to your pad and flowline layers.
Limit 03Stress, not substance
The imagery shows that vegetation or soil changed. It cannot tell crude from produced water from anything else, and we do not name the fluid.
- 2.3
Field context imageryImage chips
The surrounding ground for each candidate, so a reviewer can see the nearest pad, tank, road or flowline before anyone drives out.
- 2.4
Timed to the request
A screening is tied to your window: before a routine inspection round, or after a suspected event with no visible trace on the surface. It is not a standing feed.
Limit 04On request, not monitoring
Each screening is one pass for one request. It does not watch a lease continuously and will not alert you to a release as it happens.
03How it works
How a screening runs
- 1
Boundary in
Send the lease or field boundary, and the reason for the request: a landowner call, a suspected event, an acquisition review. Any defined boundary works, not only active pads.
- 2
Imagery
We request a multispectral pass over the boundary and pick the clearest usable image.
Limit 05Clouds and the growing season
Optical imagery needs a clear sky, so a cloudy stretch pushes the screening to the next usable pass. Snow and dormant vegetation hide the signature.
- 3
Ranking
Vegetation and soil stress signatures are found and ranked across the lease.
Limit 06Resolution floor
At 0.5 m a halo a few yards across is many pixels, and it is easy to see. At 2 m the same halo is only a pixel or two, and small ones are missed. Halos below a few pixels are not picked out, so the coarser end of the range finds only larger affected areas.
Limit 07Old halos fade
Vegetation that has recovered, or ground that has been remediated, stops looking different. A release from some time ago may no longer stand out from the background.
- 4
Delivery
The ranked list, the signature maps and the context imagery, plus a call to walk through the top of the list if you want one.
04Where it fits
Before the walk starts
Run a screening ahead of a routine inspection window, or after a suspected event that left nothing to see on the ground. Use the ranked list to decide where the walk starts. The crew goes to the top candidates, decides what each one is, and the incident log and any state report come from what they find, not from us.
For a regulator, the same list is a way to choose which leases in a screening area to visit first.
Not a reporting decision
It does not measure a volume, date a release or tell you whether a notification was due. That stays with your compliance team and the regulator.
05
Limits
- Limit 01
A candidate is not a finding
The list ranks places where the ground looks like a release. A crew has to confirm each one. Some will be a release, and some will be something else.
- Limit 02
Other things kill grass too
Drought, a vehicle track, a herbicide pass, livestock and a wet low spot can all leave a bare patch. A ranked candidate may turn out to be any of them.
- Limit 03
Stress, not substance
The imagery shows that vegetation or soil changed. It cannot tell crude from produced water from anything else, and we do not name the fluid.
- Limit 04
On request, not monitoring
Each screening is one pass for one request. It does not watch a lease continuously and will not alert you to a release as it happens.
- Limit 05
Clouds and the growing season
Optical imagery needs a clear sky, so a cloudy stretch pushes the screening to the next usable pass. Snow and dormant vegetation hide the signature.
- Limit 06
Resolution floor
At 0.5 m a halo a few yards across is many pixels, and it is easy to see. At 2 m the same halo is only a pixel or two, and small ones are missed. Halos below a few pixels are not picked out, so the coarser end of the range finds only larger affected areas.
- Limit 07
Old halos fade
Vegetation that has recovered, or ground that has been remediated, stops looking different. A release from some time ago may no longer stand out from the background.
- Limit 08
Not a reporting decision
It does not measure a volume, date a release or tell you whether a notification was due. That stays with your compliance team and the regulator.
06
Who it's for
For
- Environmental compliance leads at operators and midstream companies, screening a lease after a landowner report, a suspected event or before an inspection round
- Teams reviewing an acquired lease they have never walked end to end
- State oil and gas regulators choosing where field inspectors go first
Not for
- Confirming that a spill happened or naming what spilled
- Real-time or continuous monitoring of pads and flowlines
- Spills on water, which water-based detection is built for
- Measuring release volume or deciding a reporting obligation
07FAQ
Questions before a pilot
Does this confirm a spill?
No. It ranks candidate locations by their vegetation and soil signature, and a crew confirms each one on the ground.
Can you tell what the fluid was?
No. The imagery shows stress on vegetation or a change in the soil. It says nothing about the chemistry behind it.
Does it only cover active well pads?
No. Give us any lease or field boundary and the screening covers it, including ground you have never walked.
What if it's cloudy?
The screening waits for the next usable pass. Cloud over the lease means a later delivery, not a guess.
How old can a release be and still show?
Not very. Once the vegetation recovers or the ground is cleaned up, the signature fades into the background and may be gone.
How do we check it against what we know?
Pick a lease where you already know of releases and don't tell us where. When the list arrives, compare it with your records and see where the known ones rank.
Will it load into our GIS and incident system?
It arrives as a CSV and a GeoPackage, so anything that reads a GIS layer or a spreadsheet can take it. We don't write into your system directly.
Who owns the results and the imagery?
Ownership and licence terms for the deliverables and the imagery are written into the pilot agreement before anything is ordered. If your legal team needs to review them, ask early.
How is a pilot priced?
The quote depends on the size of the boundary and the imagery source, and we price it for your lease. Tell us how you buy services and we'll scope the pilot to fit.
Screen your lease before the next walk.
Tell us which lease or field you'd put in the pilot and what prompted the request. We'll tell you straight whether the imagery can answer it.
Start a pilot