Lakewood, Colo., 26 January 2009 – WhiteStar Corp. today introduced an optional upgrade to the Wyoming land survey grid coverage in its popular Unlimited Grid Access (UGA) product. The upgrade, known as UGA Plus – Wyoming Edition, provides a more detailed land survey grid that includes lots and tracts and quarter-quarter sections in Wyoming.
“The UGA Plus product will facilitate the permitting process for oil and gas companies seeking to drill new wells in Wyoming,” said WhiteStar CEO, Robert White. “Lot and tract information will add detail to any map that is being made for a Wyoming project.”
WhiteStar initiated the UGA Plus optional upgrade with Wyoming data because lot and tract information is exceedingly important there right now. Many townships in the state are still undergoing re-surveying that will last years, and WhiteStar continuously updates those townships.
Perhaps more importantly, Wyoming is experiencing a boom in hydrocarbon exploration right now, and the state is inundated with drilling permits. Because so much of this proposed drilling is targeting federal lands under the auspices of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Wyoming Oil and Gas Commission is encouraging drilling lease applications to be defined down to the lot and tract. BLM maps are typically the only ones containing this degree of detail, which can slow the permitting process for operators that use other base maps.
“The regulatory pressure to use BLM lots and tracts in legal documents is increasing in Wyoming, and operators are using this map information to spot wells,” said White. “The UGA Plus offering will speed the permitting process and make it easier for operating companies to determine lease boundaries in Wyoming, where lease descriptions can be very complicated.”
It is important to note that WhiteStar has added value to the BLM source maps by cleaning up the lot and tract data. This data massaging ensures that no land ‘slivers’ or ‘overlaps’ will be created between lease boundaries on the maps created with the UGA Plus product. Users of ArcView will be especially relieved that WhiteStar has eliminated the problem with slivers between polygons that can result when trying to map Wyoming leases in that GIS software package. UGA users can ‘cookie cut’ a lease of any size or shape from the lot and tract file using tools embedded in the grid data set.
Every UGA Plus product will include both the standard USGS grid and the BLM grid, allowing clients to toggle back and forth between data layers, as needed.
UGA Plus is available immediately for Wyoming and will soon be introduced for other states where lot and tract descriptions are necessary for regulatory filings. These include Montana, North Dakota, Nevada, and Utah. All of the data manipulation functionality found in the standard UGA product is fully available in the UGA Plus version.
WhiteStar introduced UGA in 2006 to provide mapping speed and flexibility to oil & gas, pipeline, utility, forestry and insurance companies that have infrastructure operations covering a few square miles or an entire region. The standard UGA provides a seamless digital mosaic of land survey and fitted state and county boundaries covering all public land survey states, including Texas and Offshore State and Federal Water in the Gulf of Mexico. WhiteStar created the UGA database product manually by digitizing 1:24,000-scale USGS topographic maps. It is delivered on DVDs as a nationwide database so that clients have complete U.S. coverage on their desktops at all times.
UGA is one of several nationwide subscription map database products offered by WhiteStar. The others are Unlimited Base-Map Access (UBA) and Unlimited Well Access (UWA). Each product includes built-in functionality that allows users to cookie cut their area of interest in any shape or size from the appropriate map data layers and export the data to nearly any commercial GIS-based mapping application.
WhiteStar includes regular quarterly updates as part of the UGA product and eliminates costly customer data management problems. Instead of trying to track the vintage and the location of “postage-stamp-sized areas” of previously purchased datasets, the customer has all of the latest update information for the nation available right at their fingertips. Liberal WhiteStar licensing policies for all WhiteStar products and services allow for data interchange among business partners, and licenses are available for posting the data on internet or intranet web sites.
For details on an UGA subscription or the cost of upgrading to UGA Plus, call WhiteStar Customer Service at 1-800-736-MAPS. Ask for Steve Pickett.
About WhiteStar Corp.
Headquartered in Lakewood, Colorado, WhiteStar Corp. has supplied digital cartographic data products, services and consulting since 1990 to the oil and gas, pipeline, natural resource, and engineering industries. As a purveyor of geospatial data products, WhiteStar takes a customized approach to every implementation project. The WhiteStar client base now includes more than 1600 companies ranging in size from local consulting firms to integrated multi-national corporations. Learn more at www.whitestar.com.