Oklahoma Exploration Company Relies on UGA as Precise Base Map

Accurate maps - whether they represent features below ground or above - are critical to an Oklahoma oil & gas exploration company that specializes in using advanced horizontal drilling and completion technology to develop unconventional resources. It has production operations in 11 states throughout the United States.

"The land grid is the starting point for all of our mapping; it has to be precise," said the Manager of Geotechnical Services. His company has purchased other digital land grid products in the past, but none have come close to the quality and precision of the WhiteStar Unlimited Grid Access (UGA) product. The Oklahoma exploration company was one of the first to purchase UGA in 2006.

UGA is a seamless digital mosaic of land survey and fitted county boundaries covering all public land survey states, Texas, and offshore Gulf of Mexico waters. WhiteStar hand-digitized the UGA data from industry standard 1:24,000-scale USGS topographic maps with the goal of providing flexibility to oil and gas companies, like the one in Oklahoma, that have projects covering very large areas or operating in many different locations around the country.

"We bought UGA because it's got survey boundaries covering the entire United States," said the Manager of Geotechnical Services. "We were spending too much money buying land grids piecemeal for all of our sites."

He added that another significant benefit weighing in UGA's favor when his company considered the purchase was the fact that WhiteStar supports UGA by sending quarterly data updates to all UGA subscribers. The means the Oklahoma exploration company can focus on finding new horizons without worrying about keeping its land base up to date. And since UGA covers the entire nation, the company always has the land grid data it needs to get started immediately on a new exploration project - even if the lease straddles county or state boundaries. "We just select the area we need and export it to our software," he said.

The Oklahoma firm, like many others in the oil and gas industry, uses the public land grid as the base layer upon which all other geographic data are built. If the base layer isn't precise, the inaccuracy will carry through and adversely affect the other data sets. Having dealt with WhiteStar for 12 years, the exploration company says it knows it can rely on the quality of the UGA data.

"We can count on it to be correct...because WhiteStar is very precise in the way they extract data from source materials," said the Manager of Geotechnical Services. "They use very good in-house quality control."

The exploration company, which employs more than 300 people, utilizes several mapping and visualization software packages including GeoGraphix, AutoCAD Map, and ESRI ArcGIS. The ability to export any size land survey grid directly from UGA into any of these software systems has made the WhiteStar product an immediate hit among users in many positions and departments within the company.

Best of all, the UGA interface software requires no training. "It's self-explanatory," said the Manager. "Right out of the box, you can start exporting information from UGA in 15 minutes."