Could You Use One Million Nimble Node Channels?

We are close to our goal of fully sampling the recorded wavefield on land. The practical barriers to achieving this have long been related to cost: CAPEX to invest in equipment inventory, or OPEX to manage huge inventories of cumbersome seismic equipment in the field. To compensate for poor sampling with sparse acquisition geometries, it has become commonplace to use geophone arrays which we find degrades the data, we need time-consuming processing approaches in multiple data domains to nibble at aliased noise, or to interpolate missing data. Cost is the key reason we have not dramatically improved the quality of our seismic, either by adding more spatial samples (pixels) to our image or by increasing signal to noise with much higher trace density – instead we often make business decisions on relatively poor quality data with huge ranges of uncertainty.

The cost of building and operating equipment has forced us to compromise our survey designs and therefore compromise our resulting data quality. If it became cost effective to own and operate a one million channel receiver system we could overcome our sampling constraint and improve data quality. We claim this is now the case with the new nimble node system.