Print this pageDevelopment of a GIS on Domestic Oil and Gas Resources
GRACE, JOHN D. and DAVID B. WALSH
The increasing volume of publicly available, machine readable oil and gas data is only of practical value if combined with software capabilities for analysis. Data released by the US Geological Survey as part of its 1995 National Oil and Gas Assessment provided extremely valuable data in raw form.
In order to enhance the practical value of the National Assessment, the data was combined with other public data and integrated into ESRI's ArcView GIS product. The spatial data describes drilling across the onshore US in 1.5 million 40-acre cells. Records include exploration status of wells, drilling results, dates, depths and number of wells per cell. These data were reprocessed to allow inclusion of results on plays tested in each cell.
Tabular data provides detailed information on the discovered resources of 458 conventional onshore oil and gas plays. Also included are the Survey's estimates and characterization of undiscovered hydrocarbons for each play. This information is accessed through tables and over three dozen charts which are made "on-the-fly" within the GIS.
The Survey's 400+ page text report is provided through an integrated hypertext document and hyperindicies for accessing specific geologic data. For dissemination, the project was recorded on a single compact disc.