Proprietary remote sensing technology developed by Texaco Inc. has become the subject of a Latin American joint venture.
Alto Technology Resources Inc., the Texaco spinoff, signed an agreement with Huinoil SA, a Buenos Aires service company, to provide Alto's patented hyperspectral remote sensing technology in Central and South America under the name Alto Americas.
Alto's unique airborne system uses an optical imaging spectrometer that records more than 200 selected wavelengths of reflected and emitted energy from the electromagnetic spectrum: ultraviolet, visible, near infrared, short wavelength infrared, and thermal infrared. The system is used to identify rocks, vegetation, soils, and hydrocarbons according to their spectral signatures.
"Any given material has a unique spectral signature or 'fingerprint' because objects absorb and reflect varying degrees of solar radiation depending upon their composition and the wavelength," said Tom Tesoriero, Alto vice president. "This important property of matter makes it possible to identify different substances or classes and separate them by their spectral signatures."
Airborne surveys carried out at altitudes as high as 20,000 ft can record several hundred square miles per day of earth.
The spectrometer is integrated with synthetic aperture radar for high-resolution definition and 3D mapping of geological features on the ground. Crews use onboard workstations with real-time image display, data tracking, and geo-referencing to monitor the spectrometer and radar.
Alto's experts analyze the data in a state-of-the-art laboratory using proprietary processing algorithms and a proprietary spectral library that contains thousands of spectral signatures.
The system was formerly known as Texaco Energy and Environment Multispectral Imaging Spectrometer (Teems) (OGJ, Jan. 17, 2000, p. 74).
Texaco proved the system, developed under the direction of Dr. Alfredo Prelat, in the US, Asia, South America, and the Middle East in the 1990s.
The sensor has the highest resolution in the industry and is the first image spectrometer fully integrated with radar. Besides oil and gas exploration and facilities design and monitoring, other applications are in the mining, agricultural, forestry, and environmental areas. Alto has set up offices in Buenos Aires, Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, and Houston.
