Land seismic crews and instrumentation: past, present and future

Bob Heath describes the somewhat volatile history of land seismic survey technology and operations and how UK company Vibtech is developing a new approach to some age-old problems. We should start by making what some would think is an unnecessary statement, namely that the majority of end-users of geophysical data are oil companies! This may seem rather obvious but the problems faced by the land acquisition industry indicate that it may not be obvious enough. If we accept this statement, we might also agree that the end-users of geophysical instrumentation, in some important sense, are also the oil companies. Any acquisition system which ignores the market generated by oil-company requirements is just asking for difficulties. The recent history of this market, which has not witnessed the growth of other high-tech businesses, seems to demonstrate that the real needs of the data end-users are too often ignored. This may explain why some agree with one bank which stated that parts of the industry demonstrate an unsustainable business model (or words to that effect). For decades, instrumentation manufacturers used contemporary electronics technology to produce systems fitting the perceived needs of end-users. The market for such products depended on how well their functionality suited the type of survey required by the oil companies. In the seventies, the limitations of the technology forced the electronics to be confined to the central system. This required data to flow along miles of twisted pair conductors in analogue spread cables. The weight and susceptibility of the equipment to various problems meant we could not easily record more than a hundred channels - as a ballpark figure. However, the technology met the need for relatively simple 2D surveys, and prices charged to acquire such data were not generally seen as excessive. The end-users supported a market of more than 1000 crews worldwide or about 100 000 channels.