Vintage Data Reprocessing - Sweetest Smoke May Come from Old Pipes - A 2D Onshore Case

During the last years, dramatic innovations have been achieved in onshore seismic processing like 5D interpolation, surface wave modeling, surface related multiple elimination, 3D deconvolution, etc. Most of these technologies take advantage of rich offset wide azimuth 3D datasets but are hard to transpose to 2D seismic.

Therefore, when 2D image did not help exploration, tendency is to jump to 3D acquisition, engaging a significant budget for seismic acquisition, sometime in a remote area with possible HSE exposure. However, in some cases, considering a 2D reprocessing is worth the investment and could lead to a complete reassessment of a block potential.

A case study from middle-east onshore 2D seismic reprocessing project shows how important is the geophysicist experience and knowledge to ensure a successful project. Indeed, technology alone is not sufficient and has to be combined with hand-made tailored processing to maximize the value of a seismic dataset.

Unfortunately, nowadays 2D datasets are often seen as old data with no value when they can, in some cases, save time and money in a world where exploration cycle periods are shorter and shorter.