Mapping the Marcellus Shale Play
October saw an important anniversary in the E&P industry that largely went unnoticed. On October 4, 2004 natural gas flowed from a Pennsylvania test well drilled in the Marcellus Shale Play by Range Resources. That kicked off a boom for Range Resources, and turned a spotlight on what some consider one of the biggest natural gas fields on the planet.
Three years later, Range had its first successful horizontal well in the Marcellus and today has more than 350,000 acres leased there. Other E&P companies soon followed Range’s lead, and now players like Chesapeake, Newfield Exploration, Hess Corporation, Cabot Oil and Gas, EOG Resources, Atlas Energy and CNX Gas are all staking claims.
Compared to the Barnett and even the Haynesville, the Marcellus is in its infancy, which means P2 Energy Solutions is receiving more requests for information about the Marcellus.
Leveraging our relationship with First American Spatial Solutions, P2 Energy Solutions has the tools to help map your strategy in the Marcellus. Read on to find out how you can use P2 Energy Solutions and its partners to put your prospects on the map.
Let’s take a look at the workflow of taking a lease and putting it on the map.
Entering the lease information
GIS Data
Mapping with Tobin GIS Studio's Spatial Data Creation tool
Writing to the Tobin Enterprise Land database
P2 Energy Solutions Tools used:
- Tobin Map Data
- ParcelPoint by First American
- I-Cubed imagery
- Tobin Enterprise Land (TEL)
- Tobin GIS Studio Spatial Data Creation (TGS-SDC)
Marcellus Data
In this example, we will create a map of a lease acreage position in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania within the Marcellus Shale Play.
To begin, the lease details, including the legal description, must be entered into a Lease Records System. This example highlights Tobin Enterprise Land (TEL) but this workflow can also work with Tobin Land Suite 5.0 (TLS 5.0).
TEL contains several fields for entering legal descriptions for eastern states and carter legal descriptions. Lease analysts can store the APN in the tax district description field. They can optionally also enter “bounded by” and other information as reference information for the GIS technician.
GIS Data
Next, you need to secure the proper data from Tobin and from First American ParcelPoint for this area. In the eastern states, counties break down into tax districts, and then into parcels that are assigned APN or assessor parcel numbers.
1. Below you see ESRI ArcMap showing the Tobin Map Data Tax district layer highlighting Lycoming County, Pennsylvania and placed against a background of I-Cubed satellite imagery.
 2. Zoom in to view Lycoming County and the Clinton Tax District.
3. Turn on the ParcelPoint layer. In the example below you can see the parcels in yellow. ParcelPoint parcels are geo-rectified off of USGS digital orthoquads.
 Each parcel has a set of attributes that include state, county, owner name, owner address, and the APN making the layer useful for finding ownership of neighboring parcels, for example, search for common owner names in the vicinity of a parcel you wish to lease:
4. Using this data we can leverage the integrated power of P2 products to easily and quickly query legal descriptions from Tobin Enterprise Land from within an ArcMap session.
Mapping with Tobin GIS Studio-Spatial Data Creation
To create the lease boundary polygon layer we will use the Tobin GIS Studio - Spatial Data Creation tool (SDC) to put the legal description of the lease on the map. SDC is an extension for ArcMap. Choose the appropriate query from a list of preconfigured queries provided with TGS-SDC.
Here, the data from ParcelPoint is used to create new lease boundary polygonal features from the legal descriptions stored in the Lease Records System, in this case Tobin Enterprise Land (TEL). Using the APN, a matching shape is found in the ParcelPoint layer, and a new polygonal shape is created to match the ParcelPoint boundaries.
The attributes are copied to the TGS-SDC “Legal Pad” window. The topmost rows show “documents,” which represent a single lease tract in TEL. The second row contains the legal descriptions for each lease tract, which has a unique tax map number and is stored. The Legal Pad makes it easy to review data from the land system with information on the map.
Note that when you click on a row, the corresponding feature is highlighted in blue on the map:
Once the user confirms that the legal description information is mapped correctly, the data can be saved. In just one click the data is written to both the Tobin GIS Studio geodatabase and to TEL.
Returning to the TEL interface, the database indicates that spatial data has been created for the legal descriptions; furthermore the GIS information has been safely stored in a production database.
Now anyone in your company can use the data and view the map.
Once the data has been mapped, you can display your lease shapes on the map along with ParcelPoint data to demonstrate your company leasehold. You can also add any other attributes stored in Tobin Enterprise Land (TEL) and leverage the power of ArcMap to analyze and visualize all your company’s business data in one place.
 This entire process is available as a screencast via CD.
You can also request a copy by calling (800) 365-4484. |