Petrohawk Says Quality and Ease of Use Separate WhiteStar Map Products from the Competition

After working with competing mapping products, Petrohawk Energy Corporation has switched to the Unlimited Access product line from WhiteStar. On a daily basis, Petrohawk geologists and geophysicists now utilize the WhiteStar UGA, UBA and UWA map products to ensure the accuracy of their work in oil and gas exploration projects.

An extensive user of digital mapping technology, Petrohawk made the switch in early 2008 after WhiteStar gave an onsite demonstration at the exploration company's headquarters in Houston showing how easy to use and accurate the Unlimited Access products are.

"Once we saw the quality of the WhiteStar products, it was an easy purchase decision," said Jason Barr, Senior Geoscience Technician at Petrohawk, which is an independent energy company involved in the exploration, production and development of oil and gas properties in the Mid-Continent and Permian Basin regions.

Petrohawk purchased a bundle of the three main WhiteStar Unlimited Access mapping products:

• Unlimited Grid Access (UGA) is a seamless nationwide mosaic of the U.S. Public Land Survey grid;


• Unlimited Base Map Access (UBA) is a mosaic of nationwide cultural features extracted from U.S. Census Bureau TIGER files; and
  
  
• Unlimited Well Access (UWA) contains well header information for all oil and gas wells in the United States.

Each of the products is delivered as a nationwide database that Petrohawk geoscientists can use to extract just the area of interest they need for a specific project area. This represents a tremendous time and cost savings to a company like Petrohawk that has interests in properties spread over many parts of the country. Its geoscientists and technicians don't have to wait to have the right data delivered since it's already on their desktop. And more importantly, the data is always up-to-date thanks to quarterly subscription updates from WhiteStar.

In a typical mapping project, Petrohawk geoscientists use the UGA grid data to locate the boundaries of leases and properties they are investigating. The cultural details in the UBA database ensure that logistical decisions are accurate and cost-effective. And the well data from UWA assists the geologists in interpreting the subsurface formation structure across leases spread over large areas.

One of the primary advantages that Petrohawk experienced was the ease of use offered by UGA, UBA and UWA. The products are compatible right out of the box with all of the popular mapping products typically used in exploration. This was critical for Petrohawk because its geophysical work is done in SMT Kingdom, while the company's geologists like to work in IHS PETRA.

"The WhiteStar products] have exports built in that accommodate both of these software packages," said Barr. "It makes their data go in nice and clean."

He added that the WhiteStar mapping products are also very intuitive and easy to use. Geoscientists and technicians at Petrohawk only needed a brief demonstration from WhiteStar, and they were able to put UGS, UBA and UWA to use right away.

Petrohawk Energy Corporation is a publicly traded company based in Houston. It currently has active properties in North Louisiana, East Texas, the Fayetteville Shale, and the Anadarko and Arkoma basins.