Offshore oil and gas platform dynamics in the North Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and Persian Gulf: exploiting the Sentinel-1 archive

Abstract

The increasing use of marine spaces by offshore infrastructure, including oil and gas platforms, offshore wind farms, aquaculture, and artificial islands, underscores the need for consistent and scalable monitoring approaches. The development of offshore oil and gas infrastructure has economic, environmental, and regulatory implications. Maritime areas are difficult to monitor systematically due to their inaccessibility and spatial extent. This study presents an automated approach to the spatiotemporal detection of offshore oil and gas platforms based on freely available Earth observation data. Leveraging Sentinel-1 archive data and deep learning-based object detection, a consistent quarterly time series of platform locations for three major production regions: the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Persian Gulf, was created for the period 2017-2025. In addition, platform size, water depth, distance to the coast, affiliation with exclusive economic zones, and installation and decommissioning dates were derived. 3,728 offshore platforms were identified in 2025, 356 in the North Sea, 1,641 in the Gulf of Mexico, and 1,731 in the Persian Gulf. While expansion was observed in the Persian Gulf until 2024, the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea saw a decline in the number of platforms from 2018 to 2020. At the same time, a pronounced dynamic was apparent. More than 2,700 platforms were installed or relocated to new sites, while a comparable number were decommissioned or relocated. Furthermore, the increasing number of platforms with short lifespans points to a structural change in the offshore sector associated with the growing importance of mobile offshore units such as jack-ups or drillships. The results highlighted the potential of freely available Earth observation data and deep learning methods for consistent, long-term monitoring of marine infrastructure. The derived dataset is publicly available and provides a basis for offshore monitoring, maritime planning, and analyses of the transformation of the offshore energy sector.