oa 0-Marine: Advance Seismic Technology for the 21st Century

Q is the Western Geco’suite of advanced seismic services and technologies for enhanced reservoir delineation, characterisation, and monitoring. Q services include proprietary Western Geco acquistion and processing technologies, Q Marine, Q-Seabed, Q-Land, and Well-Driven Seismic. Q-Marine technology was developed after detailed studies to identify the main sources of noise and error that affect seismic data quality. Q-Marine technology has four unique components: caliberated sources, calibrated single sensors, calibrated positioning and steerable streamers. Sophisticated seismic techniques have been the cornerstone of the consistent increase in the E&P industry’s exploration success rate. However, the industry is now looking beyond exploration and applying seismic technology to reservoir management tasks. For these applications, the geophysicist, geologist, and reservoir engineer require exceptional data resolution and imaging quality to understand the subtle and complex details of the reservoir. <br>A major source of environmental perturbations that affect marine seismic data quality and repeatability is the noise with sufficient spatial weather and sea conditions. Q-Marine records this noise with sufficient spatial fidelity to eliminate it using targeted filtering techniques. Unlike conventional noise suppression, this does not affect the signal bandwidth or fidelity. Q-Marine provides the critical factors needed for enhanced reservoir characterisation and commercially successful 4D surveys. These factors include seismic data with broader frequency bandwidth and higher resolution as well as increased signal-tonoise ratio, which aids geophysicists in attribute analysis. Q-Marine streamers feature the unique QOFin which allows both vertical and horizontal steering of the streamers. Fully calibrated sources, receivers and positioning, in combination with streamer steering, allow QOMarine surveys to achieve a high degree of repeatability compared to conventional acquisition. This has been a critical factor in successful 4D surveys illustrated by a number of recently published case studies. 4D surveys using Q technology have allowed the interval between surveys to be reduced whilst still giving a clear 4D image for accurate and confident interpretation.