Petroleum Land Management Oil Field Easements

Texas Tech University

The Center for Geospatial Technology at Texas Tech University designed and built a geodatabase of more than 2,500 pipeline easements in the Permian Basin of West Texas. This project was completed for University Lands, a division of the University of Texas System that manages 2.1 million acres of state lands in 19 West Texas counties. The automation of pipeline easements supported the state in its mission to obtain the highest possible returns from leasing these lands for easements.

The purpose of the project was to automate paper easement plats and address the constantly changing nature of the easement information. A procedure was developed to digitally capture easement information and incorporate it with an existing oil and gas well geodatabase previously developed by Texas Tech.

More than 2,500 easement plats were scanned and in some cases were rectified with the easement features digitized from the maps. This required interpreting the survey descriptions and analyzing map symbology to correctly capture the easement and assign the correct attributes from the rectified plats. If it was not possible to rectify a scanned plat, then Survey Analyst was used to build the easement feature in the geodatabase. Easement features were captured by interpreting the bearings and lengths from the survey description of each easement plat.

Courtesy of Lucia Barbato and Kevin Mulligan, Center for Geospatial Technology, Texas Tech University.

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