Increasing Exploration Successes Utilizing New Single-Sensor Seismic Towed Streamer Acquisition Technology

By

 Mohammed Badri¹, Morten Svendsen¹

(1) WesternGeco, N/A, Egypt

 Significant improvements have been made over the last two decades in 3D seismic imaging that lead to large oil and gas discoveries in various geologic basins. These improvements have, however, more or less completely focused on increased efficiency of hydrocarbon exploration.

As oil and gas fields become mature in terms of their production life, better understanding of the reservoirs is required to maximize hydrocarbon recovery and optimize the net present value of these fields. This paper presents seismic data from well known fields in the Gulf of Mexico and North Sea, where revolutionary new seismic technology has been applied to significantly improve the seismic resolution, amplitude accuracy and imaging quality of the reservoirs.

Seismic has not only revealed the subsurface in exploration but also has become a useful tool for reservoir management to map detailed, complex reservoir features like thin-bed and fault resolution, fluid saturation and lithology discrimination. This will require true amplitudes preservation, spatial as well as the temporal sampling of the data, and development of new data processing and analysis algorithms with sufficient confidence to influence decision making in exploration and reservoir management.

Several case studies will be presented and are based on careful analysis of earlier seismic from the fields, which enabled us to set appropriate quality requirements and specifications for the seismic imaging.

The data acquisition was performed using a new revolutionary seismic system. This system has the capacity to receive and record seismic data from each individual hydrophone, to actively steer the seismic streamers laterally to keep the cross-line spatial sampling close and constant even under the influence of cross-currents, and to measure and compensate for variations in the seismic source signal from shot to shot.

The new single sensor towed streamer technology provides high quality seismic data required for efficient and optimal drilling and production of a reservoir.