Developing disruptive and revolutionary new generation seismic technologies for the Middle East

Abstract

Extended Abstract Summary We present the business and technical underpinning for developing revolutionary onshore and offshore seismic acquisition technologies in order to meet the challenges of the new E&P business portfolio. In this paper we will also describe new seismic acquisition systems developed with external technology partners and report their progress. These new systems aim at disrupting both the onshore and offshore seismic industry by delivering accurate and high quality seismic data with significant cost improvement. For land Shell is pushing toward a million channel system development in order to drastically drive the cost down with high receiver and source efficiency, and strongly improve the seismic quality with WAZ, long offsets, and broad bandwidth for surface seismic. This system also targets permanent reservoir monitoring. For offshore applications, a multi-source fast deployed ocean bottom node (OBN) system is being developed to drastically reduce the survey cost such that it can be cost effectively applied to large exploration surveys as well as higher resolution surveys for 4D. Shell expects to commercialize these new technologies with partners in order to deploy them to Shell assets in the nearer term and to the industry in the longer term. Introduction Remaining onshore conventional exploration targets tend to distribute in areas where reservoirs are associated with structurally complex geology or lie beneath highly variable near surface or structurally complex overburden. With unconventional hydrocarbon opportunities, delineating sweet spots presents even more challenges. Current seismic acquisition and processing techniques are insufficient to characterize these difficult reservoirs. Seismic images with a quality similar to those emerging from offshore environments are necessary for better exploration and production decisions in these challenging onshore areas.