Haynesville Shale Play

LOCATION:  Northwest Louisiana

The Haynesville Shale Play discovery has commonly been compared to the gold rush as companies scramble to lease land and obtain mineral rights in the area. It is estimated that this shale area extends to over 3 million acres from Northwest Louisiana into East Texas.

Crafton Tull provided surveying services for pipeline right of way acquisition in the Haynesville Shale Play area in DeSoto, Bossier, Caddo and Red River parishes in Louisiana. Our personnel have surveyed over 1,500,000 linear feet of natural gas pipeline route. Acquisition documents are prepared on the basis of Section breakdown computations using Bureau of Land Management (BLM) procedures and boundary evidence located in the field. Currently we have used these procedures to complete Section breakdown on over 100 Sections. Using original government notes and plats, USGS quadrangle sheets, and recent aerial photography, we provided evidence that original corners had been located, flagged, and documented for precise location by GPS and Trimble robotic equipped field personnel. The terrain is dense piney woods and wetlands. This has required extensive topographic surveys of levees, roads/highways, creeks and major rivers. The right of way is staked, legal descriptions for acquisition are written and recorded, and required exhibits are drafted. An important deliverable is the ownership parcel map which includes land and parcel boundaries, ownership and record title data, pipeline location and acquisition tract dimensions. The entire operation, including data preparation and transmission is conducted on a GIS platform – AutoCAD MAP.

Crafton Tull is a member of the GULFNet Geodetic Consortium Real Time Network based at Louisiana State University. Our survey crews based in Louisiana operate GPS rovers equipped to connect to GULFNet and receive real time position corrections. This enables the quick establishment of local survey control to insure centimeter level precision of all GPS measurements. The addition of the GULFNet GPS capability is significantly increasing the productivity of our field crews