Seismic Looking for a New Image

Forget about writing an epitaph for the seismic industry.

It may not be time to pop open a bottle of the celebratory bubbly, but optimism appears to be supplanting much of the industry's rampant pessimism of the past few years.

On the investment side, there's Berkshire Hathaway's attempted entry into the seismic industry via its proposed buyout of Seitel, albeit an event recently thwarted by the bankrupt company's shareholders. The good word from John Geddes at SCF Partners investing firm, which currently is invested in two seismic companies, is there's evidence the E&P industry is craving new technologies and methodologies for shooting and processing seismic data.

It appears they're willing to loosen the purse strings to encourage these developments.

"We are seeing budget increases of 200 to 300 percent for new seismic in the Gulf of Mexico," said Mick Lambert, president, GX Technology (GXT).

In fact, there's talk on the street of a whole new seismic industry emerging to meet the growing demand for a more sophisticated seismic product, i.e., one that provides insight into reservoir complexities like never before.

It's an image thing.

"There's been a huge shift in the industry, which is in a state of flux and is driven to change," Lambert said. "Contractors used to be data collectors, but now they realize they need better quality imaging and acquisition.

"We have got all that we can out of spec-driven 3-D, and now we must go to the next level," Lambert continued. "The new focus is on the result — the deliverable is no longer the data, but the best possible image, which is the real value in the data."

So Long to Spec Surveys?

This line of thought dovetails with that of Bob Peebler, president Input/Output.

"When I look at where future oil and gas is going to be found, and also the challenge of getting more out of reservoirs that already have been found, I think geophysics will have an even more significant role," Peebler said, "especially in the exploitation and reservoir monitoring world, because we need an even better understanding of the whole reservoir to be effective."

The next technology wave to come will be more complex than 3-D, e.g., 4-D (time lapse) and multi-component, Peebler noted. This will be driven by the need to address an array of issues including ultra-deep targets, elusive stratigraphic traps and plays, fluid type identification and fluid movement over time.

Except for a few places in the world, don't look for many future seismic data to be acquired via the once wildly popular huge spec data surveys that were often implemented merely to keep excess capacity working.

That was a business model that came back to bite some companies in the form of massive write-downs of equipment and data stores.

The good news: Big, multi-client surveys led to a lot of 3-D coverage, which resulted in finding a lot of oil and gas.

The bad news: Spec survey design by definition is not problem centric. Data quality may be good, yet not fit for the specific purpose.