Mr Hickey says that Definium Surveyors is constantly seeking to improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of surveying services offered to the Australian CSG industry. He states that this has become an important goal for the company, especially as it continues to expand into the pipeline industry.

Refining the DCDB

The Digital Cadastral Data Base (DCDB) is a compilation of digital property boundaries and related property descriptions of all existing land parcels in Queensland.

It is a database that has been manually developed by the Queensland Government and is used for searching, planning and investigating land-related information.

Article continues below…

“Refining the DCDB is one of the many areas of surveying in which Definium operates,” says Mr Hickey.

Mr Hickey says that the DCDB currently functions on an accuracy indicator ranging from +/- 251 m to +/- 63 m.

“Definium has found that these co-ordinates can vary from within a few metres, to up to 200 m of their position on the ground.

“This may have been sufficient for land access negotiations in the past, however, with the exponential increase of CSG exploration and development, these levels of accuracy need to be refined to provide the landowner with the level of confidence that they expect in our modern age,” Mr Hickey says.

Narrowing the gap

Mr Hickey explains that geologists are employed to suggest areas best suited for wells to be drilled, and the DCDB is usually shown in relation to these wells, using common mapping techniques.

This digital position may differ from where the true boundaries of the land are located. “When a land access team is relying on information that can be up to 200 m out of positional accuracy, the team may encounter potential loss of confidence and respect for the resource company in its initial meetings,” says Mr Hickey.

To ensure a productive relationship between the landholder and the resource company, Definium is engaged prior to these meetings to provide a large-scale, cost-effective and timely solution that can significantly reduce the margin of error in the DCDB to +/- 2 m.

In a number of cases, Definium has refined the DCDB for major resource companies in Queensland to offer certainty and confidence for their land access team to begin negotiations with landowners.

Furthermore, Mr Hickey says that Definium was able to enhance this high level of accuracy by combining rectified DCDB with available aerial photography and contour information, to allow for greater accuracy of well locations, engineering design for access tracks and gathering systems.