Maxar Unveils a Real-Time Monitoring Solution for Protecting Energy…

Maxar announces today an innovative site monitoring solution that leverages the company’s industry-leading satellite imagery and geospatial insights to provide energy companies with an efficient way to protect their assets and optimize operations. By combining automated tasking and advanced analytics, Maxar can empower energy companies to monitor their onshore and offshore assets for situational awareness, operational updates and environmental impacts.

Energy companies often operate in remote locations that make it difficult and costly to regularly monitor infrastructure and assets. Imagery from Maxar as well as artificial intelligence (AI)-generated insights, can help energy companies maintain a current view of activities around the globe, without the expense and risk of sending teams on location until necessary.

Situational awareness from space
Maxar owns and operates a constellation of 10 very high-resolution, electro-optical satellites that collect the most 30 cm-class resolution imagery in the industry. These satellites collect imagery around the globe, unhindered by local or regional security concerns, enabling energy companies to monitor facilities and infrastructure—whether on land or on the high seas.

Click through the gallery below to see a couple of examples of how energy companies use Maxar® imagery and geospatial products for maintaining situational awareness in their areas of interest.

This high-definition WorldView-3 image shows an oil refinery on the edge of Buqayq, Saudi Arabia, on March 31, 2025. It’s an example of how Maxar’s satellites can be regularly tasked to collect high-resolution imagery to monitor operations, ensure safety compliance, inspect infrastructure integrity, and determine environmental impact. Regular analysis ensures early detection of risks, leaks and inefficiencies, helping to prevent accidents and optimize facility performance.

Maxar detected a dark tanker (center) in the above WorldView Legion^TM image from March 18, 2025. This ship is navigating through Onne Port on the Bonny River in Nigeria. Maxar advanced machine learning delivers critical information like vessel detections and classifications in near real-time. The screenshot above also shows dredging ships on the left that are broadcasting an automatic identification system [AIS] signal and a tugboat on the right which is not broadcasting an AIS signal. These detections can be part of a proactive security monitoring setup, ensuring early warning of unauthorized vessels and potential incursions that might be putting high-value offshore assets at risk.

Tracking operations across wide areas
Energy companies can operate across large regions and for a majority of the time, they experience operations happening as expected and their monitoring efforts only need to verify that fact. But in some instances, they need to be alerted to unusual activities occurring and plan a response. Maxar satellite imagery can provide the high-resolution, optical view of these remote locations, but we also partner with Umbra, operator of high-resolution SAR satellites that can see details of what’s happening on the ground through clouds and in the darkness, and Satellogic, operator of medium-resolution, high-revisit, electro-optical satellites. The combination of these technologies enables the ability to monitor areas of interest more frequently, creating a seamless collection, delivery and analysis workflow for users.

Click through the gallery below to see a few examples of how energy companies use Maxar imagery to track operations and plan responses to activities happening at or near their facilities.

Maxar imagery can cover many square kilometers in a single image, enabling energy companies to get a concurrent view of operations happening across a region. In this example, Maxar’s WorldView-2 satellite imaged the Permian Basin in Texas on February 4, 2025, putting eyes on many well pads while offering the resolution to zoom into each well pad to see the status of operations in detail. Maxar also ran an objection detection model on the image to identify cars (blue boxes) at the well pad to monitor change in activity over time. Using imagery and insights together enables an operator to know exactly which well pads need to be visited by on-site crews for reasons like maintenance, saving time and resources.

Maxar’s WorldView-3 satellite collected a 620 sq km image strip off the coast of Malaysia (center above). Within that image, Maxar analytics found multiple instances of likely ship-to-ship transfers between "dark" tankers, meaning none of the ships were broadcasting an AIS signal. An energy company would want to know where dark vessels are related to their operations and ships for operational security.

When operations are impacted, Maxar’s imagery can help energy and utility companies plan their response before they head into the field. The green boxes in this example call out where intact transmission lines are located before (February 14, 2020) and after (October 7, 2024) Hurricane Helene caused significant flooding in the Biltmore Village, North Carolina, U.S. These insights help the operator select the types and quantities of materials needed and the team members with the necessary skills to respond in emergency situations.

Observing and mitigating environmental impacts at scale
Energy companies spend a significant amount of time, resources and effort to minimize the negative impacts of their activities on Earth. By leveraging Maxar’s satellite imagery, they can optimize their on-the-ground, maintenance efforts and organize their responses when mitigation efforts are necessary.

This gallery provides three examples of how energy companies can use Maxar’s industry-leading satellite imagery and geospatial products to monitor environmental factors at their locations.

Maxar can stream access to curated datasets, both of Maxar satellite imagery and third-party data, through an API directly into an energy company’s preferred GIS application. One option, seen above, is streaming imagery of a pipeline spill through Esri’s ArcGIS, which enables an energy company to use the latest satellite imagery with their proprietary data layers to plan a response and recovery efforts.

Maxar satellite imagery helps utilities keep an eye on vegetation encroachment along transmission and distribution lines. The image above shows the lines coming from a substation along the California-Oregon border in the U.S. It’s possible to see that the vegetation is trimmed back so the utility did not need to send a crew on-site for mitigation efforts at the time the image was collected in September 2024.

Maxar advanced analytics can detect and alert users to oil spills in their areas of interest. The screenshot above shows a detection of an oil spill at an oil rig along the continental shelf near Guyana. Detections and alerts like this can help an energy company promptly respond to an offshore emergency and quickly activate mitigation plans.

Monitoring onshore and offshore assets for better decision-making
Maxar can offer energy companies frequent and global imaging opportunities, as well as derived geospatial insights, to monitor their assets, stay ahead of risks and optimize their operations. This enables businesses to make more informed decisions about security situations, operations and the environment, ultimately saving time and resources.

Meet Maxar at Esri Energy: See this innovative monitoring solution in action during Esri Energy in Houston from April 29 to May 1, 2025.

Making monitoring activities more efficient

See how Maxar can help energy companies increase the impact of situational, operational and environmental monitoring with geospatial insights.

Request a demo

Prev Post Back to Blog Next Post

Maxar Unveils a Real-Time Monitoring Solution for Protecting Energy Assets and Optimizing Operations

Email Subscription

Related posts

How HERE Technologies Utilizes Maxar Satellite Imagery for Automated Map Making at Scale

Supercharging Maxar Intelligence’s Imagery Basemaps with WorldView Legion Satellite Imagery

Using Geospatial Insights from Maxar Imagery to Help Respond to the Los Angeles Wildfires