The Q3 2010 update of WhiteStar Culture includes pipeline updates for the State of Texas as well as the Gulf of Mexico.  As always, the pipelines have been edgematched from the Gulf to the State of Texas.  Look for more exciting updates to WhiteStar Culture in Q4!

With the Q3 2010 release of WhiteStar Grid, out this week, subscribers now have access to the Pennsylvania Municipality data. This layer is very useful for people working in the Marcellus Shale Play. The data has been seamless integrated with the other layers within WhiteStar Grid.

Here at WhiteStar we are committed to ongoing updates of our data to put out the best possible digital cartographic products.   The Texas Land Survey updates for Q1 2010 have been completed.  Following is a summary of layer updates and additions:

Blocks - 10
Surveys - 471
Abstract - 535

Overlapping Blocks - 17
Overlapping Surveys - 75
Overlapping Abstract - 86

Hemphill and Jefferson Counties realized the most changes.  In addition, portions of  Brazos, Denton, Duval, Hardin, Harris, Harrison, Robertson, Shelby, Terry, Wheeler and Wilbarger Counties show updates.  Keep an eye on the blog for additional data update announcements.

Thanks,
Mike

The Downside of “Free”
Maps and charts are the lifeblood of the oil and gas industry and most petroleum executives crave the ability to visualize exploration maps in a dashboard format. The advent of free applications such as Google Earth has made complex imagery available to everyone, and while this online tool has raised awareness of the “power of the image,” it have also created confusion. For example, one cannot judge the precision, vintage, spatial accuracy or resolution of a given image merely by inspection. “Where is that well we drilled last year?” you might reasonably ask. Having the answer to critical questions is essential before putting a map into the wild, lest you run the risk of losing a deal because of lack of due diligence. For the casual user of Google Earth, these are not concerns and therefore not talked about much. As professionals, though, we must ask these questions.

A picture is worth a thousand words
Virtually any source map can be scanned and tied to geographic coordinates to form an imagery data source. For imagery data to be useful in a Geographic Information System, however, it must be tied to coordinates and overlaid with other data such oil well or pipeline locations. Explorationists commonly use imagery in the form of an air photo, topographic map, or satellite image to add a sense of “ground truth” to their maps. Points, lines, and polygons in isolation simply do not convey the same sense of truth, even though they may be precisely placed. A picture is worth a thousand words. Given an air photo, an oil company executive can instantly see the location of wells and other infrastructure. The euphoria this creates is undeniable, but sometimes misplaced unless one has confidence in the underlying process that was used to acquire and process the data.

The potentially high cost of “free”
There are several “gotchas” associated with imagery and many points along the way where errors can be introduced. Free data sources do not provide sufficient information about an image, such as its production date and quality. Where does the recent imagery start and old imagery stop? If you zoom out in Google Earth, for example, you can see many strips of data of varying quality, color schemes, and vintage. Such information is critical for exploration companies. In addition, free map services tend to have updated data primarily in urban areas, because that’s what most people care about. Not so in the oil and gas industry where our infrastructure tends to be located in rural locations.

Data overload
Imagery data can quickly fill up local storage space, even on very large computers. As data resolution increases (and engineers always want the highest resolution data available) imagery fills up disk space exponentially faster. A consequence is that 30 centimeter resolution data requires nine times more storage space than the standard one meter resolution data of just a few years ago. This trend is unlikely to change.

Because different client applications require data in different formats, on today’s servers you’ll find multiple versions of the same data in different formats just burning up disk space. Imagery management quickly becomes a mess when dealing in terabytes and IT staff spends more and more time documenting inventory, allocating server space, and updating ever larger databases when they could be focusing on revenue enhancing activities.

Third party services have evolved to address these problems, taking on the tasks of maintaining the expanding imagery database so that it can be streamed directly to oil and gas applications. For now, this involves loading the various imagery data sets and establishing web services that client applications can consume. Clients can offload internal proprietary imagery to a third party vendor and have that data streamed back into the company. This web service reduces the burden on corporate IT, saving time and money.

The future of imagery
In the future, organizations will likely take advantage of evolving technologies such as Cloud Computing with its nearly infinite computing and storage capabilities. Challenges will include uploading and downloading vast amounts of data, including rapidly changing proprietary data sets. However, the computational power of the cloud environment will offer many benefits including speed of access and the ability to use Extract, Transform and Load technologies to reformat data “on the fly.”

Free maps have popularized geospatial imagery, but they simply don’t offer the quality, robustness, or versatility needed for modern scientific exploration. The vision of the future is to store and maintain dynamic, up-to-date, multi-terabyte imagery databases on the cloud and speedily stream that data back into the enterprise for near real time analysis and decision making. The good news is that this future isn’t all that far away.

Today updates for our Unlimited Product line were shipped out.  Current subscribers can look forward to numerous data updates and enhancements.  In our blog posts over the past few weeks we have talked about a number of the data and program enhancements users will find and they are described below:

Unlimited Base Map Access:
Data Update - Updated pipeline information for the State of Texas.
Data Enhancement - Breakout tanks and pipeline information for the State of
Oklahoma
Data Enhancement - Pipeline information for the Gulf of Mexico that edge-
matches the State of Texas.
Data Enhancement - Oil and Gas Fields/ Pool outlines will be found all
throughout the Appalachian Basin, as well as the following states:  Alaska,
Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, New
Mexico, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada & California.
Data Enhancement - Added US Forest Service National Forest/Grasslands
Boundaries
Enhancement - CDF format support for smartSECTION 4.8.1.  This allows users
to load CDF formatted data directly into smartSECTION.

Unlimited Grid Access:

Data Update - Survey updates/corrections for parts of Texas

Enhancement - CDF format support for smartSECTION 4.8.1.  This allows users
to load CDF formatted data directly into smartSECTION.

Unlimited Well Access:

Data Update - Well updates for Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Gulf of
Mexico, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee,
Texas, Utah and Wyoming.

We’re really excited about these features and trust you will be also.

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.

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

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??