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.

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving holiday! As promised we have added more great 1 meter imagery data to our collection. This time we have added Colorado and New Mexico. If you’re working in these areas, this imagery would make a fantastic backdrop to any project. Let us know if you have a need for this layer.

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

For the last couple of years one of my tasks has been to incorporate the BLM survey data into our existing PLSS data set for the areas which were shown as  unsurveyed on the USGS topo maps.  As many of you are, I’m sure, very aware, once you get out to the Rocky Mountain region and head west, there are many areas which were not surveyed; and as such your maps end up with extensive holes.  By incorporating the BLM survey into the PLSS survey, we have managed to ‘fill-in’ quite a considerable portion of these areas.

While there are a couple of states like Idaho & Nevada, which still have sizable areas without a STR grid system, many of the other western states now have nearly 100% coverage.  To date, we have filled-in the following states:  Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Nevada, California & Florida.

Stay tuned for enhancements to Oregon & Washington!

-Jeff Smith

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.

WhiteStar’s Public Land Survey is digitized from USGS 1:24,000 series topographic maps using a highly accurate spatial averaging digitizing technique, which captures corner boundaries to +/- 40 foot accuracies. The Wyoming resurveys are included and Carter townships are used for Kentucky and Tennessee.