GPS World

Tag: surveying

  • Merrill Lynch Selects HPDI as Oil and Gas Data Provider

    HPDI LLC, a supplier of historical oil and gas data and decision support tools for the energy industry, has been selected by Merrill Lynch to provide its institutional investors with information and research services. As part of a new service called Merrill Open Minds, Merrill Lynch will offer information from industry-specific research companies to assist trading clients in making investment decisions. Of the seven research entities initially chosen to participate by Merrill Lynch, HPDI is the sole provider of energy information.

    “For more than a decade, oil and gas companies have relied on HPDI to provide them with the historical information they need to plan their engineering, marketing, and exploration strategies,” said Corey Rhoden, HPDI chief operating officer. “This same information proves extremely valuable to financial institutions as they evaluate potential investments in the energy sector.”

    HPDI aggregates historical oil and gas production data, drilling permits, prices, transportation, refinery and gas plant information. HPDI makes this information accessible through Internet-based applications that enable clients to query the data and display results in a variety of graphical and tabular formats, including GIS maps, charts, and tables. Clients can use HPDI tools to extrapolate data sets to predict future trends, or they can download the data to other analysis applications.

    “We are very pleased that HPDI is a part of Merrill Open Minds. HPDI offers Merrill Lynch institutional investor clients the depth of coverage and ease of use to support a sophisticated analysis of oil and gas production trends,” said John Svolos, head of Sales and Marketing of Merrill Open Minds.

    The full suite of HPDI products and services will be available to Merrill Lynch clients. All of the HPDI research and analysis tools come with online tutorials designed to allow users to quickly extract and display oil and gas data relating to specific operators, producing formations, activity dates, and geographic areas. HPDI offers its customers access to six primary databases:

    • U.S. Historical Production includes oil and gas production statistics from producing states dating back to the 1950s. This database is continually updated with new state reports.
    • Drilling Permit Database, provided by RigData, includes permit numbers, well and operator information, granted dates and actual images of the permits and plats. This database can be cross-referenced with the U.S. Historical Production data for complex queries with results spotted on a map.
    • Pricing Data contains oil and gas marketing data such as purchaser, producer, and facility information, as well as price and post information.
    • Transporter Database includes oil and gas transporting details such as to/from information, volumes, inventory, and report dates.
    • Refinery and Gas Plant Databases contain receipt and delivery information as well as activity information.

  • Schlumberger Acquires Exclusive Distribution Rights to MetaCarta for Oil & Gas Sector

    Schlumberger has announced the acquisition of exclusive distribution rights to the oil and gas sector for MetaCarta‘s map-based geographic information search technologies. Schlumberger will acquire all existing contracts for MetaCarta in the oil and gas sector, resulting in a single source for sales and support of this technology in the industry.

    “MetaCarta is the perfect compliment to expand the Schlumberger industry leadership in information management. With the increasing amount of information held in unstructured form, such as documents, presentations and web content, MetaCarta’s geographically specific access to unstructured content brings new power to petrotechnical professionals,” said Olivier Le Peuch, president, Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS). “In combination with our geoscience and engineering information management solutions, now petrotechnical professionals will be able to rapidly incorporate all available information that is relevant to their prospect or field.”

    MetaCarta search technology combines map-driven geographic search, geographic referencing, temporal filtering and data visualization capabilities, for both structured and unstructured content, making that content “location-aware.” This enables geoscientists and engineers to find and display relevant data in the context of their area of interest.

    “The Schlumberger global sales and support organization will accelerate the expansion of MetaCarta solutions in the oil and gas industry,” said Ron Matros, president and chief executive officer, MetaCarta. “We look forward to bringing geographically relevant data search capabilities to a broader set of customers across the globe.”

  • WhiteStar Introduces SpotOn at GITA Oil & Gas Show

    WhiteStar Corp. has introduced SpotOn, a Web-delivered service which enables users to reach out over the Internet to convert a well’s public land survey legal description into a precise geographic coordinate. Users can enter a few well legal descriptions into the Web site to try the service.

    “SpotOn determines well locations in real time, adding flexibility and saving an enormous amount of time compared to manual methods or the expense and time delays of using a data vendor,” said Robert White, WhiteStar president and CEO. “The service reduces errors and provides an easy way for oil and gas companies to keep their well locations up-to-date. Often companies change a well’s legal location just before the well is actually drilled and SpotOn provides the means for keeping the company’s mapping systems up-to-date as well as to improve or check the accuracy of existing well location data.”

    To obtain an accurate well location, the user enters the well’s “footage call,” “quarter call” or a combination of both. Subscribers will be able to upload and download comma-separated files for batch processing. Using the national Public Land Survey database hosted on the WhiteStar server, SpotOn then reads the description and returns the longitude/latitude coordinate representing the well’s location in terms of either the NAD27 or NAD83 datum.

    “We built SpotOn using technology developed over the course of calculating millions of well locations for our oil and gas clients during the past 19 years,” said White. “Well locations can be quite complex, but WhiteStar has developed an extensive rule base to generate latitude/longitude coordinates for any well having a public land survey system legal description.”

    Developers will have access to a programming-language independent software API that can easily add SpotOn functionality to new or existing software applications.

    The SpotOn product references the WhiteStar Unlimited Grid Access (UGA) product, a seamless digital mosaic of the public land survey grid covering all public land survey states including Alaska, and also incorporating survey data for Texas and the Gulf of Mexico state and federal waters. An UGA subscription is not required to utilize SpotOn as the service automatically references the public land survey on the WhiteStar server via the web.

  • MetaCarta to Provide the Oil and Gas Industry with Geographically Relevant Data

    MetaCarta, Inc., has announced an agreement with IHS Inc., a global provider of critical technical information, decision-support tools, and related services, to enhance MetaCarta’s Energy Geographic Data Module to provide information when searching for energy-related information specific to a location. Specifically, geologists and other E&P analysts using MetaCarta Geographic Text Search (GTS) and GTS geOdrive solutions will now be able to search for information such as blocks, licenses, oil fields, wells and basins found in IHS databases using the just-released MetaCarta IHS Global Oil & Gas GDM.

    IHS is a leading global provider of a broad range of aggregated, structured data used by the energy industry to study potential and existing oil and gas (O&G) reserves, as well as the transportation, contractual, competitive and other above-ground factors involved in bringing reserves to market. With the world’s most complete databases on wells, fields and other O&G entities, as well as geographic coordinates for these data types, IHS is the ideal choice to provide MetaCarta with a reference source to help guide smart-indexing of the vast amounts of unstructured data oil companies maintain and strive to fully leverage.

    MetaCarta GDMs are knowledge bases used to identify and disambiguate geographic references, assign latitude and longitude coordinates. GDMs contain natural language processing (NLP) logic, which is used to recognize the jargons and data types that represent geographic entities, disambiguate names, and establish greater geoconfidence and georelevance.

    “The alliance with IHS has allowed MetaCarta to develop an energy industry specific GDM utilizing the rich global knowledgebase of IHS,” said Ron Matros, president and CEO of MetaCarta. “Having the most accurate and comprehensive source of E&P information available with our search tools will allow our customers to more accurately pinpoint and collect location-specific information. Helping them get the information they need more quickly is critical to their business, particularly when they are making billion dollar decisions.”

    The Energy GDM is used with MetaCarta Geographic Text Search (GTS) as well as GTS geOdrive and contains thousands of place names, reference formats, and usage statistics particular to the energy industry. These include wells, blocks, MMS areas, oil and gas fields, basins, geologic provinces, and assorted other oil and gas features.

    “Energy companies face a tremendous knowledge-management challenge in order to take full advantage of the accumulated insights across their respective companies that relate to a particular geologic province, an individual well or other asset,” said Timothy Hopkins, vice president of Strategic Marketing at IHS. “With the MetaCarta offering, IHS customers will have the ability to search unstructured data, ranging from the proprietary archives of a retired, 30-year veteran geologist to the latest public press release on an emerging field, and choose from a list of geographically verified matching results. We think oil and gas companies will be delighted with this alliance and the added value it brings.”