In the heart of the Eagle Ford Shale play—Karnes County, Texas—oil and gas well completions totaled 162 in all of 2011. That number jumped to 194 in first-quarter 2012 alone. So far in 2014, more than 600 wells have been completed, as recorded by the Railroad Commission of Texas.

The rapidly climbing number of well completions may be just a single statistic in a single county of a single shale play, but successful resource areas generate gushers of data including drilling permits, injection/disposal permits, pipeline permits and production reports.

You say you want a shale revolution? Well, you know you’re going to have to keep track of this world-changer.

Layered approach

That’s the purpose of a geographic information system (GIS), a multi-layered digital tool that allows users to visualize and analyze data to improve decision-making about location. When coupled with digital aerial survey imagery, publicly available data and boots-on-the-ground surveys, users have the most comprehensive and timely data with which to base location decisions. GIS allows upstream and midstream players to safely navigate the labyrinth of physical assets used to produce and move hydrocarbons.

“You can look at different midstream companies in various plays, whether it’s Eagle Ford or Barnett or the Utica or the Marcellus,” Johnnie Melton, director of midstream for Fort Worth, Texas-based Holland Services, told Midstream Business. “Clients have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles of midstream assets and oftentimes these clients have it in multiple places. They can identify all of their assets and every play on one big map if they so choose through our GIS system.”

Clients can connect to Holland’s prodigious database, linking them to real-time changes as the system collects updates from public sites on the Internet, Holland’s researchers scouring records in county courthouses and appraisal offices, and helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft deployed by the company to gather digital aerial images of land parcels.

Holland Services is engaged in every shale play in the U.S., Melton said, with several hundred employees. The company began in the 1980s as a land services agent and, like a GIS project, has added layers of complexity and is developing into a fully integrated service company.

”We offer all aspects of midstream services from GIS and digital aerial survey mapping, right of way acquisition, survey, material procurement, engineering and construction to do what’s referred to as turnkey projects for clients,” said Melton.

“Right now we are primarily U.S.,” Leah M. King, Holland’s senior vice president for marketing and communications, told Midstream Business. “We are looking at a more North American strategy and looking at some opportunities potentially in South America as well.”

State of the art in treasure maps

The base level of a GIS project is the imagery of a swath of land. That’s the constant; everything else can be tailored to the client’s needs.

“We can actually overlay the aerial imagery that we take for a project into Google Earth’s file and you can specifically see the swath by which we flew,” Melton said. “We tie all of that back with X and Y coordinates that are obtained through the aerial imagery. And then we tie all of that back to GIS, which is also tied to the same X, Y and Z coordinates. As far as mapping goes, we can generate any sort of map that our clients want to have.

“What you have are layers that you can turn on and turn off,” he said. “That’s the beauty behind GIS.”

But clients are often interested in data beyond the scope of their own projects. For example, midstream companies in the gathering business may also be interested in knowing who is drilling in the area. While Holland designs each project for a particular client and does not share proprietary data, it often finds itself facilitating information sharing among clients who express a wish to collaborate.

“It is about getting the product to market,” Melton said. “[GIS] has become such a useful tool and such a useful resource in our industry. When we have known clients that we’re working with that have synergy with one another, it’s just a way to get data from one group to another group. And precise data vs. an old screen shot.”

Keeping up

The precision of GIS and digital aerial mapping becomes a critical factor during boom times, even when considering the relatively remote locations of many of the hot shale plays.

“There’s a lot more equipment; there’s a lot more volume of work out there,” Melton said. “The reason that we do it to the same degree [in rural areas as] in urban areas is that you don’t know where the next urban area is going to be.

“The Permian’s been there for years,” he continued, “but the new level of development in the Permian and the discovery of deeper production have really made another boom in West Texas. You can go to several different communities, such as Big Lake, Ozona, the list can go on and on. These were little bitty communities before this latest boom so using outdated maps is extremely problematic.”

Even when booms end, the data collection remains valuable. Melton cites the Barnett Shale.

“It was an urban development and GIS was extremely intricate in the play simply because the rapid pace of growth in the Dallas-Fort Worth area at that time that the Barnett was actually booming,” he said. “It was an ever-moving target, trying to get a pipeline from point A to point B. We certainly use GIS as a big tool of upfront route planning, upfront design, layout and development of the gathering systems that were installed in the Barnett area. Now it becomes a very useful tool after the fact simply because we have to know and continue to maintain and operate those lines as the development of land in the Dallas-Fort Worth area continues to expand. Even though the Barnett has slowed significantly—there’s not a lot of development there—that [GIS] data is still infinitely important to the operation and existence of those systems that were built.”