The GeoRef Project

El Paso Natural Gas Company (EPNG – a subsidiary of the El Paso Energy Corporation), together with its sister company, El Paso Field Services, owns and operates over seventeen (17) thousand miles of pipeline throughout Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, Louisiana and New Mexico. Information about these pipelines is maintained by the Drafting Group of Rights, Records and Land Services (RRLS) in a series of paper alignment sheets that are copied and distributed on an as-needed basis. With increasing market sector competition and the need for immediate data access, EPNG soon realized that a significant change in their graphical data management techniques was required. To this end, EPNG solicited software vendors for turnkey solutions. After evaluating several turnkey proposals, and recognizing that the Company had just invested significant capital in both hardware and software solutions, the project team decided to investigate the possibility of taking advantage of these investments and still address the need for improved data management.

With this in mind, EPNG sought out evaluate the existing softwarehrdware the services of MOORE Resource Systems (MRS) to base at EPNG and determine if these solutions could be used to improve the overall management of the pipeline data set. EPNG, together with MRS, embarked on a Pilot Project. This project, named GeoRe~, set out to demonstrate the viability of utilizing the existing clientiserver and CAD (Computer-Aided Drafting) infrastructure to maintain and distribute the vast data stores for the pipeline and ensure its long term availability by moving it from a paper environment to a digital format.

The Pilot Project involved a small section of EPNGs right-of-way that was previously covered by six (6) paper alignment sheets. The paper sheets were scanned and vectorized into a standard CAD format, however, the exercise was much more than a standard drawing conversion. Much of the information on the paper sheets was not available anywhere else in the Company and, as such, the project sought to demonstrate the importance of digitizing this information and distributing it among end users within the organization. The converted drawings were given ‘intelligence’ by attaching vital information to the corresponding graphic objects using AutoCAD@ (their internal standard for CAD drafting). This information was then exported to an external tabular (and relational) database that could be accessed by all relevant personnel including those using other applications. The database was then used to recreate ‘ad-hoc’ alignment sheets from any location along the pipeline right-of-way. Furthermore, the tabular database served as a gateway to other Corporate databases (i.e., Right-of-Way, Engineering, Risk Analysis and One-call), thus enabling users to augment traditional tabular data with more descriptive graphical alignment information. At the same time, EPNG was able to access exact digital replications of the traditional paper alignment sheets (see figure 1), either by sheet name or geographical location. Raster aerial photographs of plan sections were also included.

Figure 1 - An Alignment Sheet Genersted from MS Access in AutoCAD