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Track: Petroleum and Mining
Robert White
The WhiteStar Corporation
333 W Hampden Ave Suite 604
Englewood, CO 80110
Telephone: 303-781-5812
Fax: 303-781-5275
E-mail: rcw@whitestar.com
Louise Eshelman
Beyond Spaghetti: Polygonizing the Texas Railroad Commission Digital Land Base
Defining Issue: In order to spot oil wells and draw lease polygons for oil and gas exploration or pipeline management, a fully polygonized and attributed land database is required. GIS Solution: The WhiteStar Corporation developed a procedure to convert the Texas Railroad Commission linework data of original surveys and well spots in Texas to a fully polygonized and attributed polygon and point coverage. Methodology: The raw linework from the Railroad Commission was converted to ArcCAD format using a C program developed in-house. This provided a CAD drawing of arcs and text, and an ASCII text file of well spot information. Second, ArcCAD was used to identify overshoots and undershoots in the linework. Third, annotation was arranged for aesthetics, checked for spelling and consistency, and inserted appropriately to provide label points for each polygon. Fourth, the data were organized by polygon type into an appropriate Texas land survey hierarchy of blocks, surveys, abstracts, and subdivisions.
Finally, Paradox was used to export the well spot ASCII file to ArcInfo generate format. Using A/I Version 70.4, this file was converted to a point coverage of well locations. Software: The polygonized database was created using an in-house C program, ArcCAD, dBASEIII+, and Paradox. The purpose of this paper is to give an example of how to use Esri software to greatly enhance the value of data files digitized using older technology and enable these files to be used for analytical, IS purposes such as well spotting and lease polygon creation.
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