Create Quarter-Quarters for any Township and Range
December 24th, 2008
Sometimes you want to create a land map showing the quarter quarters for that township, because your land parcels are described in terms of NW NW, SE SE, etc. and you wish to plot your land ownership on a map. This is a perfect application for our Legal2map web service. I created a 576 line long polygon description of the township 26S 12W in the 6th Principal Meridian. I had one entry in the text file for each aliquot piece I wanted to generate, for example SE SE of section 1, SE SW of section 1, etc. I then ran the file through legal2map and it produced the desired 576 polygon representation of the township (36 sections * 16 aliquot pieces = 576). Using this technique you can create quarter quarters in shapefile format for any section and/or township you want in the USA. See the attached PDF for a closer look!
This morning an executive from a major oil company called us looking for an alternative to his existing land grid data and expensive maintenance plan from a competitor. He told us that his budget for 2009 was being cut by several hundred million dollars and that his group was being asked by upper management to renegotiate existing contracts and rates with their existing vendors. This is definitely a trend given the present state of the economy.
Basically WhiteStar has an opportunity to provide additional value and to save customers money who are currently licensing expensive competitive data and paying annual licensing fees while maintaining high value and quality. Let’s take for example a customer licensing Texas data for $150,000 on a one time basis plus paying a 20% licensing fee ($30,000) per year. At WhiteStar, an Unlimited Grid Access (UGA) subscription costs $9,000 per year for a NATIONWIDE land grid subscription. The maintenance fees are included in the cost of the subscription.
I’m asked, “How can you afford that?” Basically, we have a large customer base subscribing to the data and averaging out the costs over a large customer base. With more than 100 subscription clients, We no longer have to rely upon ”event driven revenue”. One time purchases are difficult to plan and grow a company around.
Secondly, I am asked, “Is your data of as high a quality?.” You expected me to say “yes” to that, didn’t you? We’re happy to provide samples so that you can compare ours to other data sets. In almost every case, the analysis results in our favor. There are good reasons for this. Our public land survey system data was captured using special software specifically designed for the task. Our Texas data were originally based on records from the Railroad Commission of Texas, but about four years ago IHS Energy struck a deal with us to license our data for use in their products. IHS Energy is the leading data provision company and standard setter in our industry. We capture feedback from their customers (and our own) to improve our data.
While our data can be sub-licensed through IHS Energy as a set of shape files, the features and functions you need to cookie cut, reproject, and format land grid data to other formats are only available from WhiteStar via the Unlimited Grid Access (UGA) software. All sorts of systems and formats are supported such as GeoGraphix, SMT Kingdom, Petra, AutoCAD, MapInfo, CSV and ASCII files, etc.
I have fielded a few tech support calls recently, which have brought to my attention that Petra has made some changes to their coordinate system parameters.When starting a new project within Petra, typically the first step is to set the Map Projection Settings to display the data in the desired XY coordinate system.Please notice that with the latest release of Petra Version 3.2.0.1 (10.29.2008), you now have the option, from the Map Projection Settings window, to display imported data using a Standard or Customcoordinate system.If reviewing the details of the Currently Applied Projection, the windows will appear as such:Standard and Custom.
When loading WhiteStar survey data, you will want to set your Map Projection Settings using the Custom option.After clicking the Custom switch, you will then have the ability to set your display projection to UTM, State-Plane, Polyconic, etc… Typically, WhiteStar delivers survey, culture & well data in Lat/Long NAD27 coordinates for the Petra user; so this coordinate system discussion applies to the end users needs for map display only.
Today I have been invited to speak to the Kansas Geological Society, a library and a group of professional geologists, about the history of the public land survey. My primary focus is to tell them about the various methods used to survey the public lands of the United States. Thomas Jefferson was the visionary of this system - he was a brilliant, visionary man who foresaw the need for actual coordinates in the map making process hundreds of years before anyone else. If you drive down a road that follows a section line , most of the roads in the Midwest and West, then you’ve been influenced by T.J. today.
I will also tell them that before the land ordinance of 1796, sections within a township were not always numbered boustrophedonically (with section 1 in the northeast corner, then west to 6, down to 7, and right to 12 and so on like an ox would plow a field) until one reaches section 36 in the southeast corner.
In early land grid surveys in Ohio, section 1 was actually located in the southeast corner of the township, thence north to section 6. Section 7 was then adjacent to section 1 (where you would find 35 today) and thence north to section 12 (where you would find section 2 today). Do you follow me? The two systems have in common the relative locations of sections 11, 21, and 31 by coincidence.
Google scanned an excellent book with many of these details entitled “Ohio Lands and Their Subdivision” by Williams Edwards Peters. It’s an excellent and fascinating read and soon you will learn all sorts of interesting details surrounding the earliest land surveys. Curiously, on page 59, Peters writes, “No good reason is known for changing the plan of numbering sections adopted by the ordinance of 1785, which was evidently analogous to the manner of numbering the townships and ranges , to the plan adopted by the act of 1796, as neither has any advantage over the other, unless it be that the latter follows more nearly the plan of our horizontal system of printing, writing, etc. ”
As an aside, One also wonders why so many Indian chiefs received such large land allotments in their own name - was it in perhaps an enticement to give up tribal lands? Or was it to recompense them for lands already stolen? Peters’ book lists many such tracts that were “specially surveyed” but without comment.
Many of our users like to add an image as a background for the base maps they build. We have recently added 2008 vintage, 1 meter resolution imagery for all of Kansas, Oklahoma and most of Texas. These new images will, without a doubt, make your mapping projects stand out. Add some of these into your projects and be the envy of all your map making buddies!
Feel free to download these and have a look. These images will work great with any of our other products. Specifically, Unlimited Grid Access (UGA), Unlimited Base Map Access (UBA) and Unlimited Well Access (UWA)!
I was browsing the New Mexico State Lands web site the other day and came across these hard copy reports of oil and gas leases that the state wishes to lease in mid December. Here is the link to that web site: http://www.nmstatelands.org/default.aspx?PageID=36 in case you’re interested.
This site has legal descriptions for each lease as well as the total acres, primary rental fee, and the minimum acceptable bid. Using our legal2map web service, I keyed in the 49 legal descriptions as well as the other attributes I was interested in, then produced the polygons with the web service. Using ArcGIS and FME Workbench from Safe Software, I merged the Comma Separated Value (CSV) attribute file with the shape file. In ArcGIS I added our township and range data, well location data, and culture information (mainly roads and dry lake beds, but you wouldn’t want to drill a well in a dry lake bed if you could avoid it, would you?). Here’s a link to the map I made: http://www.whitestar.com/blog/?attachment_id=24
The entire excercise took about 2 hours and I greatly improve the quality of my decision making with all these additional sources of information and making my leases visual and mappable. I also added the state oil and gas well data (using UWA) to show what leases already have production on them. Sweet!
I went through this excercise to show you the power of putting together readily available pieces of information so that you can make the best decisions possible which is very important considering the high value of leasing programs these days.
The Railroad Commission of Texas offers a “snapshot” of its map database(s) for $9,129 per one time purchase. http://www.rrc.state.tx.us/programs/datasets/digmapstate.php There is no update or maintenance program, that’s what you pay each time. Therefore if you were to update your data quarterly, you’d be out $36,516. Not to mention, you would receive an ftp folder full of thousands of unmerged files in a variety of different formats. So not to blow our own horn too much here, okay we will, but you could get a desktop subscription to Unlimited Grid Access and Unlimited Well Access for HALF that and not only would you get all the wells in Texas 4 times per year, you would get well header and where available other data such as tops for the entire USA plus the offshore. This amounts to nearly 4 million well records. How’s that for value??
Got a legal description like 6 26S 12W SW SW representing oil and gas lease polygons? If so, you will want to try out our new legal2map service (the trial period is free) at http://www.legal2map.com This web service will turn your legal description into a polygon that you can put on your map or just instantly see the results in Google map. Try it for free and start getting that “yellow” on your map.
I often get the question, “Isn’t land grid a static database?” Well actually, no. This Wyoming State BLM page is devoted to changes and resurveys in Wyoming. You can see all the townships that have been resurveyed in just the past ten years. There are a lot of reasons for such resurveys often relating to problems dating back to the 1870s. The lands have become increasingly valuable as oil and gas wells are drilled and therefore must be accurately resurveyed when questions arise. This site also is a great resource for demonstrating the complexity of those “little squares” that are townships and ranges…. http://www.wy.blm.gov/cadastral/products.php Check out the “Approved Survey Plats” for individual years, such as 2007.
The Public Land Survey System or PLSS is familiar to most who have ever done a real estate deal, leased an oil and gas lease, or taken a plane flight over the central US. We’re talking about those roughly one square mile sections you see from 30,000 feet. Have you ever wondered how they were actually surveyed? Most of these surveys are 150 to 225 years old and were measured using 17th century technology. Edmund Gunter developed a surveying tool - a chain consisting of individual links - that provided accurate measurements when held taught. This chain was 66 feet long, so a quarter quarter section would be ideally 10 chains on a side. Township plat maps to this day still contain measurements in terms of chains, where a “perfect section” would measure 80 chains on a side. The chain has an oddly metric aspect to it - each chain is divided up into 100 links, so one link is actually 7.92 inches long. Gunter’s Chain was a surprisingly accurate standard and was used right up until 1970 when better methods came along.
