First Break - Volume 31, Issue 11, 2013

Paradigm executive vice-president technology, Duane Dopkin, tells First Break of the company’s plans to broaden the appeal of its software to the mainstream user.

EBN, the Dutch state oil and gas company, has reviewed the Dinantian carbonate in the southern North Sea play and is sharing the results of its study in a bid to stimulate industry exploration activity.

Alex Goertz, Jens Fredrik Wisløff, Francis Drossaert and Jaafar Ali discuss how modelling the source output of marine airgun arrays can be used for planning marine mammal mitigation measures as part of marine seismic survey design and environmental permitting.

Bill Pramik says that after decades of attempts to develop marine Vibroseis, the technology has developed to the point that it is now possible to do projects in the field. Use of airguns during acquisition in shallow waters is becoming increasingly restricted due to fears over their impact on marine mammals. Marine Vibroseis is one technique that could overcome this problem.

Patrick Smith, Jason Thekkekara, Julie Branston, Grant Byerley, David Monk and Jeffrey Towart describe, with an example from the North Sea Forties field, how multi-measurement streamer technology enables the reconstruction of a monitor survey to the streamer locations and datum of a previous survey, thus improving time-lapse repeatability.

Julie Svay, Yuan Ni, Cheikh Niang, Nicolas Bousquié, Anna Sedova and Thomas Mensch propose new indicators for assessing the quality of 4D positioning from the repeatability of target illumination and monitoring the source signature variations.

Acquiring vertical seismic profiling (VSP) data in a well using conventional wireline technology requires an array of seismic sensors to be lowered down the well to record the seismic signals generated by a shooting vessel on the surface. Due to the expenses involved when interrupting production this is rarely done in producing wells and VSP has not been economically feasible for monitoring purposes. The intelligent Distributed Acoustic Sensing (iDAS) technology enables a fibre-optic cable to be used as a massive acoustic sensor array. Presently, fibre optic cables suitable for iDAS measurements are deployed along many wells for other purposes. The iDAS can be retrofitted to existing optical fibres to acquire densely sampled acoustic measurements at low expense because the normal operation of the well is not disturbed.