USING MODERN GEOGRAPHIC TOOLS TO STREAMLINE WY BLM’S OIL AND GAS UNIT AGREEMENT PROCESS

When dealing with Federal, state, and fee oil and gas leases, legal land descriptions submitted in a document called Exhibit “B” need to be cross referenced to applicant’s submitted map, referred to as Exhibit “A”, for proposed Unit areas that are handled by the Bureau of Land Management’s Reservoir Management Group (RMG) located in Casper, Wyoming. Premier Data Solutions along with MapInfo Corporation developed CarteView as a Plug-in for ArcGis. This software will take a legal land description and electronically processes the information to provide a visual output in a fraction of the time it takes to manually verify the mapped areas.

To accomplish this, we used the NAD83 Intersected land grid as a reference and ran the data against a cleaned up (i.e. formatted) Excel file, separating the Exhibit “B” data by lease, Meridian, township, range, section and survey type (i.e. aliquot, lot, or tract) and outputting a comma delimited file (.CSV file) which can then imported and converted by CarteView as a shapefile into ArcGis.

Overall results have been very promising with this software. We are not only able to get a quick visual of the tract areas, but can see where CarteView did not map an area, leaving a hole in the unit, which can be investigated to see if that section is missing from the legal description of Exhibit “B”. In addition to creating the visual output, the tool saves an Error Report wherever you saved the final output (feature class, shapefile etc). This tells the user if any of the missing areas were supposed to be mapped, but yielded an error instead. This map occur for lots or tracts is there is additional text related to these legal descriptions which CarteView cannot intrepret. We found, at times, the error report will come back saying everything was successfully mapped, however upon examining the map, some areas were not mapped, or were mapped incorrectly but CarteView felt it had successfully completed the process. In addition to working with CarteView, I have been establishing a series of ArcTools and geodatabase systems for the continued map production with minimal steps for the RMG to use upon completion of my GeoCorps Position, Summer 2016.