USGS Central Region Energy Resources Team

Central Region Energy Resource s Team

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     Federally owned coal also plays an important part in the U.S. economy: more than a quarter of a billion dollars in royalties are generated annually from production of Federal coal. Of that amount, about half is disbursed to the States in which the coal was produced (fig. 3).

     To develop a standardized digital library of Federal coal ownership data, the USGS in cooperation with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is collecting files of surface and mineral ownership and compiling them in ARC/INFO coverages. Before this project was undertaken, these ownership files existed only in specific BLM offices, in different formats, and with varying scales. For some areas, no digital ownership coverage existed; for those areas, we are

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constructing digital files. Once the ownership coverages are generated and standardized, they are combined with digital maps of coal deposits. This combination of digital data enables the user to answer complex geospatial questions about coal quantity, quality, availability, and recoverability.

    Figure 4 is a hypothetical township as an example of the original source data. The complex combination of colors and patterns represents mineral and surface ownership. When these source data are digitized in ARC/INFO, we apply attributes to the polygons to indicate whether the surface is Federal, State, or privately owned, and which energy minerals, if any, are Federally owned (fig. 5).

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U. S. Department of the Interior
U. S. Geological Survey		 USGS Fact Sheet FS-012-98
February 1998