Dr. Vince  Matthews, Colorado State Geologist, spoke to about 30 high level industry representatives and WhiteStar clients yesterday at the University Club of Denver on “The Global Scramble for Natural Resources – Its Impact on Colorado”.    The event was co-hosted by Spatial Solutions Group. Matthews warned of escalating prices for metallic and rare earth minerals, even accounting for the recent economic downturn.  He also pointed out that China is the sole source for many rare earth minerals used notably in manufacture of vehicles like the Toyota Prius,  and that it is now increasingly unwilling to export many metallic and rare-earth minerals.  Matthews pointed out that China is rapidly acquiring all of the mineral resources it can during the down economic times at bargain basement prices, including a recent attempt to acquire coal resources in Kentucky and a strategic molybdenum mine in Colorado.   This trenda is almost completely unnoticed in America.  Matthews likened Chinese mineral resource acquisition to a high stakes game that, “Most Americans do not even know we are playing”.   In short, we are selling our children’s futures to foreign interests.   Matthews is the State Geologist for Colorado and Director of the Colorado Geological Survey.

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.

Happy Holidays to all.

Regards,

Robert

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??