Maps are so crucial to the oil and gas industry that it’s hard to imagine conducting business without them. Who hasn’t left a desk, gone down a hall, and looked up sites to visualize the properties where there are wells, leases, prospects, etc. It’s a basic truth of the industry that to run an energy business is to keep the details of many locations and their importance to your business in your head. But with the complexity of many oil and gas businesses, this is not always possible. And even for those brilliant types who can manage it, the data they have can’t always be up to date.


Figure 1. Enertia’s map presentations deliver tool tip data while also allowing users to drill down directly into a live integrated database. (Images courtesy of Enertia Software)
Based on requests from customers, Enertia Software has incorporated mapping capability directly into its product. Months of working with clients resulted in a transfer of knowledge about how mapping can benefit oil and gas executives. What follows are some of the keys to using map functionality to save time and money — and even enjoy the work.

Maps give data depth

A map is just a pretty picture and immediately dated unless it’s tied to what’s important to you: your data. When you bring up a map on your computer desktop, you should be able to drill down within it to every well, lease, production volume, or ownership interest that your company has and to do so in a variety of visual ways. Perhaps you need to see the relationship between one lease and another. On your computer desktop, you should be able to pull up every invoice or transaction data surrounding specific assets. And you should be able to see the geography and any overlaps with other wells, neighbors, and anything else related in your integrated database.

McElvain Oil and Gas, a Denver-based, privately held company with production in Wyoming, Colorado, Oklahoma, Utah, Kansas, and New Mexico, has been using the product for several months. Chief Financial Officer David Sykes of McElvain said, “This saves us time every day. We are able to go to from the one map to another in seconds. No matter if we’re looking at land or financial or production, we can do all of that off the same screen to get the data that’s critical to manage the day-to-day business.”

With a couple of mouse clicks, executives should be able to change out mapping visuals on their screens from line drawings delineating property holdings to satellite map imagery. Regardless of the visual, the underlying data also must be instantly accessible, to be superimposed based on specific need. That convergence of map and data can lead to an “aha” moment — when all of the pieces and parts click together to help crystallize a decision. It is just more likely to happen when everything — data and visuals — is at your fingertips.

How current is your information?

Figure 2. Enertia offshore map – Satellite imagery, topographic data, and an array of culture data bring a visual perspective to live data. These tools can be used for board room presentations or simply as a primary interface to the data in your world. 

A big printed map on the wall of the company’s situation room can give you some of that detail, but it requires you to go back and forth among the data in your computer, the spreadsheets, and maps that may have been drawn upon numerous times. Perhaps, in order to stay up to date, your company prints new maps and posts them every month. Even in that case, our fast-moving industry can make them obsolete for decision-making purposes in just a few days’ time.

However, once data and map are tied together electronically, with constant, immediate updates from the field being uploaded automatically, what you see today is what is accurate today. Even better — what you see this morning may be updated this afternoon, and you will know it immediately.

“This technology has altered our business in such a way that we would never go back,” Sykes said. “It makes everything easier to manage and easier to control. All of our data is fully integrated, from inventories to actual gas production, to all of our income, leases, contracts, you name it.”

McElvain has distributed laptop computers to the field, and now the corporate office in Denver never has to wait for information. Everyone, from pumpers in the field to accountants in remote offices, enters data directly into the system, and it is immediately accessible in Denver. It all integrates with McElvain’s other software systems, including Microsoft Office products, so that an employee trained on Excel spreadsheets, for instance, is using a familiar system.


Implementation is key

Of course, Enertia didn’t invent maps, but the company did build its own mapping product to leverage the ability to tie it all together seamlessly. The company then took advantage of the technology that is available to anyone with an Internet connection and the grasp of the underlying technology to provide users with a competitive advantage. This way, the client has updated maps as fast as satellites and corporate data changes allow.

The best part of this evolving technology is that it is unlimited. As more services and data become available for fee or for free, the user’s options expand along with that offering.
Make it work for you

“There’s no doubt, this new mapping system will change our world,” said Sykes. In both big and little ways, going digital with reports, data management, and mapping functionality will alter the industry. McElvain, for instance, has found itself going paperless just because everything is digital now. “Because all of our data, from inventories to actual gas production, to all of our income, leases, and contracts are integrated to where we image them, everything is digitized now. We don’t use paper much. A contract comes in, we scan it; we don’t need any other paper generated. We can see the image of that contract any time, in relation to every other document related to it. It links to reports. It links to maps. Eventually, as necessary, it will even generate a check without having to print out anything but the check itself. The departments are linked. The remote sites are linked. There’s no reason to have reams of paper printed, and in fact paper is obsolete so fast, why bother?”

So cool it’s fun

Finally, what’s the point of being in oil and gas, having such a complicated and yet crucial business, if you can’t have fun while doing it — and frankly, it can be fun to look at your business from a visual standpoint. An intuitive and accurate program, using maps and graphs to chart your business, can allow you to play with the options for growing your business in a way that perhaps you never had time for before.

Our experience has been that executives can be a little overwhelmed at first because suddenly, the true complexity of it all is available at their fingertips. But once that initial hurdle is overcome, the technology available today can vastly increase productivity and satisfaction with the job.

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