A Chinese lighting vessel taken with Planet Skysat on September 22, 2018. Photo: Planet Labs PBC.

Planet Labs is partnering with SynMax, a Houston-based satellite analytics and intelligence company, to provide energy insights and monitor dark vessel movement. 

SynMax founder Bill Perkins met Planet CEO and co-founder Will Marshall at his 2014 TED talk and came up with the idea of using Planet’s imagery to monitor hydraulic fracturing crew activity on a daily basis. SynMax developed a model that incorporated Planet’s daily PlanetScope data into an analysis of frac crew activity and the company is now using the imagery to monitor the location of hundreds of well pads for hydraulic fracturing and frac crews. 

SynMax said this information allows the company to inform energy-focused hedge funds so the funds can accurately forecast the near-term supply of oil and gas.

“The problem of accurate near-term oil and gas supply forecasting has been a persistent issue for energy hedge funds, and I was immediately interested in how Planet’s satellite data could be used to reliably monitor frac crew activity,” Perkins said. “Supply is so critical to price that once this [frac crew] data becomes available to the market, we believe that hedge funds will be unable to trade without it.”

Separately, SynMax plans to provide maritime solutions for illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, illicit ship-to-ship transfers, and vessel spoofing. The company is developing a dark vessel tracking product — Project Theia — to allow vessel operators, maritime insurance companies, and hedge funds to discover, monitor, and investigate dark vessels operating all over the globe.

“SynMax has found that it can discover in-mass maritime vessels all over the world that are not transponding their locations using, in part, Planet’s daily imagery,” said SynMax CEO Brendan Moore.