About NCS Live
A live map of the Norwegian Continental Shelf, built from open data by Smpl and Melvær&Co. Free, no account, no tracking beyond anonymous analytics.
What it is
NCS Live draws every in-service oil and gas installation, subsea structure, pipeline and field on the Norwegian Continental Shelf over bathymetric seabed relief, with live vessel traffic and offshore helicopter movements on top of it. 94 fields are producing as it stands, and the map shows what each of them is doing right now.
It began as an attempt to answer a simple question — what is actually out there, right now — with published data rather than a diagram. Everything on it is traceable to a named public source, and anything derived is labelled as derived.
What it is not
It is not a digital twin. A digital twin mirrors the state of real equipment through live telemetry from that equipment; this is a map built from published records and public position feeds. It is not an operational tool, it is not for navigation, and it should not be used for either. Pipeline throughput is estimated from monthly production rather than metered, helicopter positions are dead-reckoned between known departures and arrivals, and cable routes are schematic.
Who built it
Smpl builds digital products and tools, and did the engineering behind this one — the data pipelines, the WebGL rendering and the live feeds. Melvær&Co is a Norwegian design studio, and shaped how the shelf reads: the palette, the typography, the way a hundred and sixty installations can sit on one screen without becoming noise.
Where the data comes from
- Sokkeldirektoratet (the Norwegian Offshore Directorate) — installations, pipelines, fields, licence partners and monthly production, under the NLOD licence.
- BarentsWatch / Kystverket — live AIS vessel positions.
- Avinor — helicopter flight data, from which offshore sorties are estimated.
- SSB — realized export prices, used to value production.
- Havforskningsinstituttet / MAREANO and Fiskeridirektoratet — cold-water coral observations and the areas closed to protect them.
- Open-Meteo — wind and wave forecasts. ETOPO bathymetry via AWS Terrarium tiles; basemap © OpenStreetMap contributors, © CARTO.
Questions
- What is the Norwegian Continental Shelf?
- The Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) is the seabed area where Norway holds sovereign rights over petroleum resources, covering the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea. It holds roughly 90 producing fields, and its output is the largest single source of Norway's export income.
- What does NCS Live show?
- Every in-service surface installation and subsea structure on the shelf, the offshore pipeline network, field outlines and seabed relief, with live vessel traffic and offshore helicopter flights on top of them. Optional layers add seismic survey activity, cold-water coral, wind and wave forecasts, and a counter for the value each field is producing today.
- Where does the data come from?
- Infrastructure, fields and production come from the Norwegian Offshore Directorate (Sokkeldirektoratet) FactPages under the NLOD licence. Vessel positions are AIS from BarentsWatch and Kystverket. Helicopter movements are derived from Avinor flight data. Coral observations come from the Institute of Marine Research and MAREANO, and export prices from Statistics Norway (SSB).
- Is the vessel traffic real time?
- Yes. Tankers and offshore support vessels are drawn from live AIS positions and refreshed continuously, with speed, course and self-reported destination. Helicopter positions are dead-reckoned estimates between known departures and arrivals, not surveillance.
- Are the pipeline flows measured?
- No. Pipeline thickness and the travelling flow animation are estimates, derived by accumulating monthly field production through the pipeline network. They are not metered throughput, and thickness is not pipe diameter.
- Can I see how the shelf was built out?
- Yes. The time machine replays the shelf from 1971, the year Ekofisk started producing, to today. Installations and pipelines appear in the year they entered service, with total production and the number of producing fields for each year.
- Is NCS Live free to use?
- Yes, free and with no account. It is a public visualisation of open data, built and designed by Smpl and Melvær&Co in Norway.
Elsewhere
Every producing field has its own page with current output, operator and installations. A machine-readable summary of the whole map lives at llms.txt. Denne siden finnes også på norsk.