New spy technology to spawn oil revolution

According to its developers, the SFD could save oil and gas companies up to 90% of their exploration cost by reducing the time spent searching for a reservoir and drilling into to it to determine whether there's actually any oil and gas still there.

"Because it's all done from the air, SFD doesn't need on-the-ground permitting, and it covers vast acreage very quickly. It tells explorers exactly where to do their very expensive 3D seismic, greatly reducing the time and cost of getting accurate drilling information," NXT Energy Solutions President and CEO George Liszicasz, told Oilprice.com in a recent interview.

Mexico's state-owned oil company Pemex has already put the new technology to the test both onshore and offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, and was a repeat customer in 2012. They co-authored with NXT a white paper on their initial blind-test used of the survey technology.

At first, management targeted the technology to frontier areas where little seismic or well data existed. As an example, Pacific Rubiales Energy is using SFD technology in Colombia, where the terrain, and environmental concerns, make it difficult to obtain permits and determine where best to drill.

The technology was recently contracted in the United States for unconventional plays as well.