Processing New Generation Seismic (NGS) in from Unlimited in-House Centre

Abstract

Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) has upgraded its seismic crews to enable high<br>channel count and high-productivity acquisition of wide-azimuth (WAZ), finely-sampled seismic data<br>(“New Generation Seismic”). These crews operate 24 hrs per day using simultaneous vibroseis sourcing<br>and are consistently setting world-class production records well in excess of 13,000 VPs per day. The<br>typical PDO WAZ survey acquired by these crews is approximately 2,700 km2 of 4000+ fold data in<br>25x25 m common midpoint bins. The resulting data volume per survey is approximately 25 billion<br>seismic traces and 130 Terrabytes.<br>As a result of these changes the volume of seismic data arriving at PDO’s In-House Seismic Processing<br>Centre each month has increased by a factor in excess of 10 in the last year alone. Currently the<br>processing centre receives over 20 Terrabytes of field data per month from two crews. This data<br>explosion has necessitated large scale upgrades to the processing centre, including substantial<br>increases in CPU capacity, network bandwidth and online and offline data storage. Total disk storage<br>for ongoing project work, for instance, is set to rise to 2.8 Petabytes. Despite upgrades, CPU demand<br>will outstrip local capacity and external resources will be accessed to provide the in-house centre with<br>“unlimited” CPU.<br>In addition to the hardware upgrades, geophysical software developments have been equally<br>important. These developments include data-adaptive ground roll attenuation, software to facilitate<br>azimuthal velocity analysis, a new 3D Radon multiple attenuation module and the implementation of<br>Common Offset Vector and 5D interpolation.<br>The transformation of PDO’s in-house seismic data processing centre to accommodate and fully utilize<br>New Generation Seismic will be described in this paper.