Reducing Drilling Risk through Improved Seismic Imaging, Utilizing New Single-Sensor Acquisition Technology

By

 Mohammed Badri¹, Morten Svendsen¹, Mark Egan¹

(1) WesternGeco, N/A, Egypt

 Conventional 3D seismic techniques have through the last two decades shown significant improvements in reservoir delineation and mapping structural features leading to an increased efficiency of hydrocarbon exploration. However, new reservoir challenges in various environments such as the Gulf of Suez, Western Desert and offshore Nile Delta require a vastly improved seismic technology that would result in increasing success rate and reduce drilling risks.

Seismic imaging has not only revealed the subsurface in exploration but also has become an effective tool for reservoir management to map detailed, complex reservoir features like thin-bed, and fault resolution, fluid saturation and lithology discrimination. This would require preservation of seismic true amplitude, high resolution sampling, and data processing analysis tools.

This paper will address the geophysical challenges in Egypt and demonstrate how the new seismic single sensor technology can resolve them. Examples from well known fields in the Gulf of Mexico and North Sea will be presented, where new seismic technology has been applied to significantly improve the seismic resolution, amplitude accuracy and imaging quality of the reservoirs.

In the case studies performed, the data acquisition was performed using a new revolutionary seismic system. This system overcomes the current limitations of the existing seismic technology. The new technology has the capacity to receive and record seismic data from each individual seismic receiver and performs Digital Group Forming (DGF) that addresses source and receiver perturbations along the recorded acquisition pattern.

We believe that single sensor seismic technology would significantly improve reservoir definition resulting in a reduced drilling risk and increasing exploration and development success rates in Egypt.