Processing and Analysis Results of the First 3D Nimble Node Survey; West Siberia, Russia

BP, Rosneft and WesternGeco jointly developed a new nimble node for land seismic acquisition ( Manning, et al., 2018 ). The first 3D acquisition using this new system was conducted in Western Siberia, Russia in early 2018 ( Brooks, et al., 2018 ) where the nimble node was tested alongside conventional land cable geophone array equipment for data comparisons. Three data volumes were processed using a robust standard pre-stack time migration workflow. They include the cable system with conventional geophone arrays (50 m inline spacing, 12 geophones per group), the original nimble node survey (5 m inline spacing) and a decimated version of the nimble node survey (50 m inline spacing). The comparisons indicate that the increased sampling at 5 m contributed to improved vertical and spatial data resolution and image quality. Of note, even at 5 m station spacing, the nimble node was deployed twice as fast as the conventional cable geophone arrays ( Brooks, et al., 2018 ). Better image quality together with significant acquisition operational speed improvements make nimble node surveys attractive solutions for land acquisition.