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.

Quite often I’m asked if landgrid changes. It sure does. Since March 2005 we have added data to over 13,000 townships across the US. As Jeff Smith stated in his September 1st blog, most of the changes have occurred with the addition of BLM and other government data. The US Forest Service publishes maps that include newly added sections and townships. We have been working on capturing this data as well.

In addition to the PLSS, Texas has seen it’s fair share of edits. Since March 2005 over 30,000 data modifications have been made. At WhiteStar we take pride in the continual improvement of our databases.  Our Unlimited Grid Access subscribers are able to take advantage of these continual improvements.  For more information on Unlimited Grid Access click here.

If you have any questions about Unlimited Grid Access feel free to contact us and we’ll give you a personal demo.

-Mike Schiewe

From time to time we are asked why there are “holes” in the land survey. This is particularly true in western states. There are a couple of reasons for this - originally the public land survey system was designed to patent “useful” lands such as agricultural land, which didn’t include mountainous terrains. Surveying funds were first expended on areas where the return to the government would be greater, i.e. arable lands. Secondly, Spanish and French Land grants already existed in many western states, most notably California, Arizona, New Mexico and up into Oregon and Washington. The plss had to “infill” around these existing land grants and honor the existing land claims. Many of these grants are quite large, for example the Tierra Amarilla Spanish Land Grant in New Mexico, and do not have any internal subdivisions. Nonetheless, over time government agencies have on occasion “protracted” pseudo townships and ranges into these areas to provide for a more complete fabric. Where possible, we have captured this data into our enhanced data products and have attributed it accordingly.

With the next release of GeoGraphix users will be able to consume web map services within GeoAtlas.  We’ve been working closely with the folks at GeoGraphix for the past few weeks and now have a beta version in-house.  Public and proprietary imagery, topo maps, landgrid or any other type of map service wrapped up in an ESRI .lyr file can be consumed and quickly rendered in a GeoAtlas map.  Have a look at this.  This image is an overview map of the wells, imagery and PLSS data for the State of Wyoming.  Once the wells were imported into WellBase, the township and imagery layers were quickly added.  Nationwide imagery, Land grid, Well locations, Topo Maps are avaialble via this model from WhiteStar.   If you’d like to see more, please contact either Steve Pickett or Adam Feldman at 800-736-6277.

Click on this link to read our new newsletter. Basically we’re saying you can get access to the most accurate land grid for the price our competitor charges for yearly maintenance. How can we do that? We are the only company to have a subscription model coupled with tools for outputting the data in the format and coordinate system you need now anywhere in the PLSS system or in Texas.   Click here for newsletter copy.

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.

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!

Regards,

Robert

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

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.

Regards,

Robert