Geoforce Discovers There’s More than Rum Punch in the Caribbean

By Cornell Hardman and Jay Karlson

“We need a lot more than that.”

-Billy Ocean, maybe (he had to have said that at least once, right?)

Quick! Tell me one thing you know about Trinidad.

Most of you will say -if you say anything- “and Tobago.” A few of you will say “Billy Ocean.”

All of you are right. But now you need to add “Oil”, and you need to add it fast because the oil market in Trinidad and North Latin America is booming. According to The Oil & Gas Year, “going into 2019, Trinidad and Tobago is the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the Caribbean.” With oil reserves at 200 million barrels and production at 99,000 BOPD (Barrels of Oil Per Day), it sits at the top of all producers in the region.

Asset tracking has traditionally been slow to take off in Latin American markets, as most telematics providers were content to report latitude and longitude and plot it on an online map, even though that map was, well, just a big blue ocean (the watery kind, not Billy) with absolutely no context.

But as Billy Ocean (maybe) said, “We need a lot more than that.”  When one of our customers hit big on several consecutive drilling efforts, their asset tracking needs surged and they required everything Geoforce could provide, yesterday. For example, we were providing dots on a map, but now they needed geocoding to show when assets are close to wells, and whether the assets are within the appropriate lease block.

So Geoforce went to work and brought ourselves up to speed for Trinidad, which had beat us to the party, oil-wise. To do this, we partnered with Enverus, a company that helped us put the customer’s oil well locations into our Track and Trace online map. Trickier than you think, because most oil wells are drilled using the BANANA model (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone). That is to say, most well sites are quite rural. And remember that “at sea” part.

The customer is delighted that they will soon have greater visibility to assets nearest oil wells. After all, they’re on a hot streak. The old tracking models for Latin American asset tracking just won’t cut it anymore. They definitely “need a lot more than that.”

We’ll keep you posted on our progress. Right after we get Trinidad to pick our lottery numbers.

PS. Please don’t sue us, Billy Ocean. We’re fans.

Cornell Hardman and Jay Karlson are Senior Product Managers at Geoforce.