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Meeting the Challenge of Mesozoic Exploration
- Publisher: European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers
- Source: Conference Proceedings, EAGE workshop on Developments in Land Seismic Acquisition for Exploration, May 2010, cp-159-00012
Abstract
The Western Desert of Egypt challenges the exploration for oil and gas both from the reservoir as well as from the surface. The reservoir rocks are often intensely faulted and fractured. Mapping these reservoirs requires high quality 3D seismic data of broad bandwidth with frequencies above 40 Hz to provide sufficient vertical resolution and lateral discrimination of reservoir features. This paper addresses the challenges of the Western Desert through the introduction of point-receiver based seismic technology. Conventional receiver arrays, which attenuate surface waves and high frequency signal, are replaced by point-receivers. Coherent noise attenuation can be carried out on point-receiver traces, whilst additional signal enhancement is taken care of in subsequent steps. The result is often a substantial increase in high frequency content of the desired signal. Reducing multiple contamination is one of the greatest challenges in land seismic processing. Demultiple algorithms and innovative workflows are presented, specifically designed to handle 3D land geometries and attack multiples in a 3D sense. In practice, these methods, relating to both surface and interbed multiples may be combined and cascaded to obtain the optimum solution. We will illustrate the benefits of point-receiver technology through examples from Egypt and the Middle East.