How a new cable-less land seismic survey acquisition system was born

John Flavell Smith recounts how Scottish company Vibtech is winning over the sceptics with its cable-less onshore seismic acquisition system in which key ingredients are technologies originating from the mobile communications and Internet communities. The Vibtech story started quite by chance. Vibtech co-founders Bill Park and John Flavell Smith had worked together at GECO in the UK during the late 1980s and both had subsequently returned to Scotland. In 1995, Flavell Smith saw a small advertisement that Park had placed in the press looking for field personnel and called him. They arranged to meet up and that was the starting point for the Vibtech journey. Both recognized the need to rid land and transition zone seismic systems of the messy and problematic digital cables and connectors which are responsible for huge logistical, troubleshooting and HSE issues. If this could be done, then system channel counts could increase and explorationists could concentrate once more on data quality and not on the logistics of moving massive recording systems. To achieve this, they had the idea of applying techniques from the burgeoning mobile telephone and internet markets to seismic instrumentation. Vibtech was founded to explore those ideas and the world’s first Cellular Seismic acquisition system was born. This would be the first time that a seismic acquisition system capitalized on technologies developed for other industries and integrated them into the system architecture, breaking the mould of seismic instrumentation design, which had historically used bespoke engineering solutions. The great advantage of this design philosophy was that emerging new technologies could be incorporated into the system without the need to completely re-design the system. Vibtech has constantly seized upon these opportunities to refine its systems. The huge operational benefits of cable free and light weight systems are obvious and are the holy grail for the seismic designer and operator alike. These benefits have been widely discussed previously in this publication, by Burger (2000), Jack (2003), and Heath (2004), to name a few. It is interesting to note that Vibtech’s competitors have recognized that its approach to delivering a cable free system is on the right path and have recently changed their plans to follow. Vibtech has now designed, developed, and commercialized a full-scale seismic acquisition system from the ground up, something which many have tried but few have managed. In the process, Vibtech has raised well in excess of $20 million in venture capital, built the workforce to more than 30 personnel, including an in-house R&D team of engineers, opened offices in London and Houston, and has representation in all of the major exploration regions of the world. Vibtech systems have now recorded more than 100 3D surveys in North America, Australia, and China.