Slashgeo

dct writes "All Points Blog is sharing its excitement about technews making mainstream news. The story is about LIDAR real-time monitoring of pipelines. Share the excitement here, read the Associated Press version here and read the original story (dating from July) here". From the article: "For a stratospheric panorama, the National Energy Technology Laboratory has considered lifting such airborne imaging up to 80,000 feet high on balloons or circling drones. "All of a sudden it takes very few of these sensors to cover the entire United States," said a government physicist who spoke on condition of anonymity under Energy Department rules."

Vector One links and discuss the oil industry and visualization technologies. Very Spatial discussed the geography of oil as main topic for their 38th episode. The Google Earth Blog also provide links to oil and geology related stuff for Google Earth. From the OilOnline article: "Yet, from 4D seismic and the dynamics of visualization rooms to state-of-the art software for drilling operations, technology is dramatically reducing the industry's historic trial-and-error statistics. [...] It's become increasingly evident that small independents having access to virtually the same technology as majors is changing the business landscape."

Slashdot runs a story about using Google Earth to help predict electrical problems. Their summary: "What do you get when you combine images from Google Earth and the brainpower from researchers at Oak Ridge National Labs? Well in this case you get a tool that enables real-time status of the national electric grid that federal state and local agencies can use to coordinate and respond to major problems such as wide-area power outages, natural disasters and other catastrophic events. The Visualizing Energy Resources Dynamically on Earth (VERDE) system, announced this week, mashes together images and stats of everything from real-time status of the electric grid and weather information to power grid behavior modeling and simulation." In a personal comment, I can't help but think that Google Earth did a great job to geo-enabling a lot of researchers, but many of the mentioned capabilities have been existing in GIS for years. Some related stories copied below.