Fresh from securing a significant contract from the UK Oil & Gas Authority to interpret UK Continental Shelf seismic data to spur exploration there, privately-held Frogtech has launched Section Sketch 2016, the latest iteration of the technology that the firm has long-used but has now brought to market.

Frogtech said Section Sketch provided the missing cross-section view for subsurface professionals working across both the hard rock and petroleum sectors using ESRI's ArcGIS geographic information systems platform.

GIS are used in everything from city planning to environmental monitoring - and a lot in petroleum and mineral exploration.

The company's software and GIS product line manager Phil Henley told Energy News that while a lot of existing software packages would produce a cross-section, they tended to end there as a static output.

Frogtech's new innovation is "fully live, dynamically generated" from the data, which allows geologists to work with the section itself.

Henley said the new innovation "makes it very easy to load any data into the ArcGIS, configure it to display in a cross-section view, and from there have it fully editable".

"Petroleum and mineral geologists have always worked in cross-section view - and this brings that ability back in to a GIS environment," he said.

"At Frogtech it has underpinned our geological studies for years, so we're pleased to have it out in the market now.

"In petroleum, for example, you can integrate your seismic Imagery, well data, formation surfaces and 3D features; you can bring it all together very quickly.

"In minerals you could have 3D features of an orebody you can draw sections through any which way you like, and it's all dynamic and interactive."