Flam - A Simultaneous Shooting Test in West Africa Deep Offshore

In recent years the search for better marine seismic acquisition efficiency has being pushing the Simultaneous Shooting methodology assessment further. Significant efforts have been spent to understand the implications of simultaneous source acquisition, and different techniques have been developed to optimize required processing methods to separate the sources. Moved by that impetus, in 2010, during its first WATS survey in West Africa (in Angola deep offshore), Total EP Angola/Total and partners took the opportunity to undertake a simultaneous shooting test using real data. Taking advantage of the WATS survey design (two shooting vessels, front and rear, and one recording vessel) a complete 3 tiles seismic line was shot in simultaneous shooting mode. The line was acquired in an area with negligible feather and complex geological settings, which would allow a straightforward comparison between the two datasets. Different approaches to separate the blended sources have been tested, having most of them revealed to be effective. In this paper we will present and describe two of the tested approaches and respective results, and show that we can effectively separate/process simultaneous source data and obtain, as expected, images with a better S/N ratio than the ones obtained from conventional acquisition.