Case Studies

The flexible and knowledgeable team at Coffey Engineering & Surveying provides innovative solutions for our clients’ toughest civil engineering, land surveying and GIS and Geospatial challenges.

Lovell Mine GIS Platform

Bighorn Basin, Wyoming

Client challenge:

The superintendent of the Lovell Mine needed a way to locate available mining claims in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming.

Coffey solution:

Coffey Engineering & Surveying created a customized, user-friendly GIS platform to locate claims and establish a vital link to information that is essential to current and future operations at the mine.
Researched and combined the following isolated and discrete mine claim records into a comprehensive electronic dataset:

Bureau of Land Management (BLM) mine claim history and current activity accessible through GeoCommunicator and LR2000 searchable Web sites.
BLM mine claim locations and activity in the Big Horn Basin as recorded in BLM hard-copy documents, available exclusively in Cheyenne.
Wyoming State Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) mine claim permit boundaries and additional geographic locations not found in BLM records, and available exclusively in Cheyenne as hard-copy records of maps and other data.

Used the comprehensive electronic dataset to perform the following customized functions for the client:

Develop a point snap-grid as a 20-acre parcel sub-set from the BLM Geographic Coordinate Data Base (GCDB) Quarter-Quarter dataset, taking into account the many irregularities of the PLSS map information.
Create claim polygons using the GCDB-derived snap-grid for all information obtained through BLM and DEQ research, joining all tabular data to polygons.
Obtain GIS parcel ownership data from the county assessor’s office, and perform gap analysis of spatial and tabular information against new dataset.
Create a GIS spatial layer of open, unclaimed land using map algebra between favorable geologic areas and the claim layer.
Establish a GIS data viewer showing all unclaimed land areas for future exploration.

Ongoing benefits:

Lovell’s Bentonite Performance Minerals plant works closely with Coffey to research and explore favorable geology formations, profitable deposits and low competition in the Bighorn Basin. Coffey’s user-friendly GIS platform makes updates and long-term maintenance of the existing data highly streamlined. The project is adaptable to new software releases and can easily transition from a deployed, static application to a real-time server or Internet-based application for both use and data upkeep.

“…Coffey’s personable staff provides consistently high-quality work in a timely manner, and when Coffey submits a report, I know it’s done right.”

Warren Scott, Lovell Mine Superintendent, Halliburton