We’ve been working with a number of companies who are working in or looking to work in the Marcellus Shale Formation.  Here’s a wiki link that has everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the Marcellus and then some:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcellus_Formation

WhiteStar has the data you need to put together base maps and presentations as your explore this formation.  Our Unlimited Base Map Access (UBA) and Unlimited Well Access (UWA) products can speed along the development of your maps to give you that competitive edge.  Scanned topos and 1 meter air photo imagery are also available.  Give us a call at 800-736-6277 if you would like to discuss our data product options.

-Mike

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.