In his September 23rd blog post, Jeff Smith made you all aware of the Oil & Gas Field layer addition to Unlimited Basemap Access (UBA) for 4th Quarter 2009.  In addition to the Oil & Gas fields we’ve added gas transmission and HVL pipelines for the State of Oklahoma as well as pipelines for the Gulf of Mexico.  These data sets have been seamless integrated into the already available Texas pipelines.  Good stuff!

Here at WhiteStar we are staying true to our vision of providing our clients the data sets needed to make their jobs easier and hopefully more fun.  Stay tuned to the blog for additional news on other product improvements and enhancements in the coming weeks.

One of the more nagging problems with state well information is the scattered reporting of well elevation information.   Well elevations are required to build a geological structure map, from which underlying geologic structures such as oil traps can be deduced, prospected, and drilled.  Basically, one subtracts the formation top depth from the well elevation to calculate a normalized subsea value which can be contoured.   Because of the huge number of wells without elevations, particularly in the state of Texas, prospecting at a sub-regional level is difficult with missing data.

In the past, we had access only to 30 meter data to interpolate well elevations.  Mike created a statewide 10 meter ArcGIS Raster data set.   Note that this data set has postings every ten meters instead of 30 meters as before making it nine times larger than before.   It took Mike approximately 180 hours of computer time to generate the SDE data set using ArcGIS.  I then used FME Workbench from Safe Software to perform a point on raster interpolation taking the more than one million Texas well  WGS84 longitude/latitude coordinates and overlaid them with the ArcGIS Raster SDE 10 meter topography.  We will now package this up and deliver it as an enhancement to our Unlimited Well Access subscribers.  This process is a tangible improvement to our data that will allow our customers to “find oil and gas faster” as they can now map more readily on a subregional basis.

This map shows a portion of the Colorado Interstate Pipeline system.  I buffered it a half mile on either side using FME.  Then I converted legal descriptions to polygons using  legal2map for land owners along the right of way of the pipeline.  Pretty cool, huh?  I also added some well information from our Unlimited Well Access product.   ArcGIS from ESRI does a great job of exporting PDF files at user defined resolutions. 

These types of map can be created anywhere in the country using our Unlimited products.  One might imagine that some simple proximity analysis could provide pipeline owners with information about wells drilled within a certain distance of their pipelines on a timely basis.  Maybe the system could even send out an urgent email to the sales force!

The pipeline data shown here are from the old Energy Information Administration database files.  After 9/11 the EIA took these data offline.  Pipeline data are now only available from private vendors who do their own research.

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!

Here’s a link to 4 sample images around the Cushing, Oklahoma area in Geotiff format, UTM Zone 14, NAD27, feet:  http://elevation.whitestar.com/webdnlds/2008_1M_OK_UTM14_NAD27ft.zip

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)!

-Mike

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.