Alberta Wells Dataset: Pinpointing Oil and Gas Wells from Satellite Imagery

TL;DR

This paper introduces a large-scale satellite imagery dataset for detecting oil and gas wells in Alberta, enabling remote sensing approaches to address environmental pollution caused by abandoned wells.

Contribution

It provides the first extensive benchmark dataset for well detection using satellite imagery, facilitating research in remote sensing and environmental monitoring.

Findings

Baseline algorithms show potential for well detection.

Significant room for improvement in computer vision methods.

Dataset includes over 213,000 wells from Alberta.

Abstract

Millions of abandoned oil and gas wells are scattered across the world, leaching methane into the atmosphere and toxic compounds into the groundwater. Many of these locations are unknown, preventing the wells from being plugged and their polluting effects averted. Remote sensing is a relatively unexplored tool for pinpointing abandoned wells at scale. We introduce the first large-scale benchmark dataset for this problem, leveraging medium-resolution multi-spectral satellite imagery from Planet Labs. Our curated dataset comprises over 213,000 wells (abandoned, suspended, and active) from Alberta, a region with especially high well density, sourced from the Alberta Energy Regulator and verified by domain experts. We evaluate baseline algorithms for well detection and segmentation, showing the promise of computer vision approaches but also significant room for improvement.