Insider tracking of global oil supplies is information worth paying for. Predicting changes in the availability and price of oil can be extremely lucrative, and geospatial analytics company Orbital Insight is leading the field in capturing and selling data that can then be sold to hedge funds, energy companies and others looking to anticipate oil price moves, this Wall Street Journal video shows (watch, runtime: 05:33). The company has used satellite imagery and AI to find over 25k oil tanks located throughout the world, and it regularly examines their contents to estimate how much oil is inside each one.

Measuring shadows is the key to calculating volume: Oil tanks have floating roofs that rise and fall, according to the volume of oil inside — which could range from 50k barrels to over 1 mn. Orbital’s computers measure the shadows cast on or around the area of each tank to gauge the quantity of oil inside: the bigger shadows, the less oil there is inside the tanks. Examining this data over time allows the firm to track when stockpiles grow and shrink in different regions, offering insight into supply availability in parts of the world where data is scarce or unreliable. The result is that traders across the world have access to this valuable information weeks — and sometimes months — before official figures are released.