First Break - Volume 31, Issue 3, 2013

Jean-Georges Malcor, CEO of CGG, is heading the rebranded company on a new journey following acquisition of the Fugro Geoscience division. Andrew McBarnet offers this profile of the man and the business.

Saudi Arabia has almost one-fifth of the world’s proven oil reserves, and is the largest producer and exporter of total petroleum liquids in the world. This energy profile published last month by the US Energy Information Administration provides the latest insight into what is one of the world’s energy ‘power houses’ and how it is positioning itself to meet future international and domestic demand for oil and gas.

Ted Shuck provides an inside look at the world of the E&P software developer and how it has changed since the early days of Fortran and punch cards. The illustrations are a reminder of how far things have advanced.

Jim Hollis and Murray Roth explain how the methodology of predictive analysis already adopted in numerous industries can be applied to oil and gas E&P projects.

Vladimir Turchaninov, Nina Zakharova and Jerry Hubbard report on advances in the Russian oil industry’s bid to enhance its field lifecycle interactive management system including the incorporation of open data exchange systems.

As seismic processing technology advances, it opens opportunities for further improvements of existing datasets. This is especially important in the case of survey areas that may no longer be accessible for new seismic acquisition. The onshore Bahrain Field is just such a case because massive urban development since the original acquisition of a 3D seismic dataset in 1998–99 precludes any large-scale reshoot effort. The application of new 3D wide-azimuth processing techniques to the Bahrain dataset has substantially improved imaging of both shallow and deep reservoirs. Furthermore, the subset of the data volume that is near-surface/near-offset, and therefore wide-azimuth, has provided better fracture characterization of key shallow oil reservoirs. Here we describe the main processing steps that resulted in these image improvements, and we provide an example of how the azimuthal data improved fracture characterization.

A simple inclusion-based rock physics method is investigated for modelling the elastic logs recorded in a sand–shale sequence. The model uses a single aspect ratio at each depth applied to the total porosity. The aspect ratio varies with depth whilst the elastic properties of the component minerals are held constant. The variation in the effective aspect ratio with depth is predictable from petrophysical properties. Once the relationship has been established, it can be used to identify and correct data quality issues and improve the petrophysical interpretation, resulting in a consistent and corrected set of logs for seismic reservoir characterization workflows. The model relies on the ability to predict both shear and compressional velocities using a single aspect ratio at each depth, and on this aspect ratio being predictable from data other than the elastic logs themselves. It is not anticipated that these criteria will be fulfilled for all rocks. However, it is expected that even when the method fails the results will still lend insight into the physics of the rocks.

Aeromagnetic compensation is an important topic within the field of airborne magnetometry that deals with the modelling and elimination of interference effects generated by the manoeuvring of the aircraft flying in the Earth’s magnetic field. The focus of this work is on the robustness and stability of the compensation model. The importantance of these properties is discussed, and objective measures to assess them are introduced. The measures complement basic performance metrics, and are based on compensated standard-deviation performance across different data sets, and on rankings of the model’s coefficients according to their contributions to goodness of fit. Application of the measures on a number of actual field data sets is analysed to determine their merit and contribution to ensuring the quality of the data produced by aeromagnetic surveys.