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

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.

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

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

I was browsing the New Mexico State Lands web site the other day and came across these hard copy reports of oil and gas leases that the state wishes to lease in mid December. Here is the link to that web site: http://www.nmstatelands.org/default.aspx?PageID=36 in case you’re interested.

This site has legal descriptions for each lease as well as the total acres, primary rental fee, and the minimum acceptable bid. Using our legal2map web service, I keyed in the 49 legal descriptions as well as the other attributes I was interested in, then produced the polygons with the web service. Using ArcGIS and FME Workbench from Safe Software, I merged the Comma Separated Value (CSV) attribute file with the shape file. In ArcGIS I added our township and range data, well location data, and culture information (mainly roads and dry lake beds, but you wouldn’t want to drill a well in a dry lake bed if you could avoid it, would you?).  Here’s a link to the map I made:  http://www.whitestar.com/blog/?attachment_id=24

The entire excercise took about 2 hours and I greatly improve the quality of my decision making with all these additional sources of information and making my leases visual and mappable.  I also added the state oil and gas well data (using UWA) to show what leases already have production on them.  Sweet!

I went through this excercise to show you the power of putting together readily available pieces of information so that you can make the best decisions possible which is very important considering the high value of leasing programs these days.

Regards,

Robert

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??