The paper describes the experience of application of geographic information technologies and methods of processing of the Earth remote sensing data for solving practical tasks in the search for hydrocarbon deposits. The most important feature of technological processes in this sphere is the necessity to analyze large flows of spatially distributed data of different nature in real time. We propose a service-oriented approach to organize a geographic information system (GIS) in order to optimize the solution of tasks in nature management and exploration for oil and gas studies.