GITA GIS for Oil & Gas Conference Sessions

As the stresses from age, natural disasters, and increasing usage begin to wear on North America’s utilities and transportation infrastructure, GIS has played an increasingly valuable role in helping to identify, assess, and monitor any actions necessary to alleviate these stresses. Whether identifying risk across our nation’s critical infrastructure or mobilizing assets in response to a catastrophic hurricane landfall, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has found geospatial technologies to be a key component to providing situational awareness for protecting the Nation’s Critical Infrastructure. With over 85% of the U.S. Critical Infrastructure owned by industry, the DHS leverages GIS data and Web-services to exchange information with federal, state, and local government entities as well as private owners and operators of critical infrastructure key resources (CIKR). Michael Matechak will educate conference attendees on geospatial systems, tools, and methodologies utilized by DHS for incident management impacting CIKR. Through the examples demonstrated, Matechak will highlight the importance of involvement from oil and gas infrastructure partners and will review information sharing challenges that have impeded decision-making and post-event response to date. This opening session will educate conference attendees on how GIS is being utilized on a broad scale to protect America’s oil and gas infrastructure from dangers and natural disasters, and will provide a unique opportunity for those in attendance to interact directly with representatives from one of our country’s most critical government agencies.