A new player is capturing market share in the sizzling seismic market.

It's always nice to be in the right place at the right time. Just ask the folks at Global Geophysical Services.
The company began staffing up and ferreting out private equity financing early last year when there was still considerable angst in the seismic business about overcapacity triggered by the last industry downturn. This was particularly true in the marine environment, where some out-of-work streamer vessels were shooting data simply to keep crew members busy.
Fast-forward to only 6 months ago, when Global became operational. Demand for seismic services had essentially undergone a 180° spin from the depths of the dark times. Opportunity knocked, and the new company quickly put four experienced crews to work in widely divergent locales.
Seismic is hot most everywhere today as the oil finders search diligently for new reserves worldwide. At the same time, they continue to ponder how best to produce greater volumes from known reservoirs - and how to do this in a cost-effective manner.
To accomplish these goals takes a lot of know-how, good data and, in many instances, new equipment, e.g., Global's recently christened state-of-the-art catamaran seismic vessel designed specifically for shallow water.
But in this competitive business, shiny new gear and a spiffy new boat will take you only so far. If you're all dressed up, you must have somewhere to go. The route appears to have been mapped carefully.
"Others have legacy gear and equipment, but we're building organically around new equipment, providing standard types of new technology in large channel-count configurations that enable us to compete cost-effectively with anyone in the high-density arena," said Richard Degner, president of Global. "The E&P (exploration and production) companies are wanting to extract more and more hydrocarbons from the rocks and, to accomplish that commercially and efficiently, they need more geophysical data, specifically high-density datasets."
The company recently deployed a marine crew in the Gulf of Mexico, where it's shooting a high-density, long-offset program in shallow state and federal waters from High Island to the West Cameron area.
It is noteworthy that the three other crews already deployed are focused on land, which at least one industry veteran predicts to be the next mega-trend. But these won't be run-of-the-mill shoots for the most part.
In fact, the bulk of land activity in North America will focus on the more unconventional plays, e.g., the Barnett Shale, according to Bob Peebler, president of Input/Output. He noted exploration-type plays will dominate seismic activity in areas like Russia
and China.
Right in sync with these predictions, Global has one crew busy in the Barnett, with another headed that way after working jobs in East Texas and still another crew making a trek to the Former Soviet Union.
The trend to use seismic in the Barnett is relatively new but gaining in momentum.
"The value of the seismic is as a hazard survey to avoid faults and other structural features, such as Ellenbuerger karst collapse features," said Craig Adams, president of Adexco Production, an active player in the Barnett where it drills mainly horizontal well bores. "The faults thief the fracture energy out of the shale, and fracture containment is what the Barnett play is all about. If you have an open fault, it's a conduit, and the fracture energy goes down into the open conduit into the underlying Ellenburger or up into the overlying formation."
Global is preparing to implement a survey in the Barnett for Adexco and EOG Resources, using its Reservoir Grade 3-D technology.
"We're encouraging them to record high-density Reservoir Grade 3-D using p-wave," Degner said. "It has five times the trace density of the adjacent survey and four times the spatial sampling.
"We know high density makes sense in other plays," Degner noted, "and this will be a real test to find out if it's commercially viable in the shale. With Reservoir Grade 3-D, I think we'll see inside the shale reservoir and understand more about the fractures and porosity and encaptured gas."
Pertinent features of the technology, in addition to the high-trace density, include:
• Full aperture recording (full offsets, wide azimuth);
• Smaller natural bin sizes for increased resolution; and
• Optimum signal bandwidth.
Contrary to what one might expect from the highly competitive (read: close-mouthed) E&P players, operators are banding together in shared data acquisition programs with nary a thought about who might see what data.
"There are a lot of guys there who work sort of like general contractors, lining up a lot of small programs and putting them in a series, so the geophysical contractor comes in and knocks them out one after the other," Degner said. "A bunch of little surveys are added together to produce scale, which makes for more efficient operations, so it's more cost-effective for the clients."
Adams concurred. "The larger the shoot, the better - you get a better look at the geology, and you spread the cost among a lot of different companies," he said. "It's common
in the play because you're not prospecting for anomalies; you're just trying to avoid hazards. If you already have the acreage, why not share the seismic data?"
Wayne Hoskins at MapSnapper Consulting Group maintains a high profile in filling this and other related needs.
"Besides acquisition contracting, we're involved in permitting operations, surveying, bulldozing operations," Hoskins noted. "We bid out batches of projects with each phase so we can bundle small operators' projects in with the larger jobs - it's more efficient for all."
Meanwhile, a project being kicked off a world away in Georgia, adjacent to the international waters of the Black Sea, will provide a whole new set of challenges for Global, which is shipping the equipment - including huge vibroseis trucks - overseas for the assignment.
While the company takes pride in its trove of brand new tools, the flip side of new is old, and it's a big plus here, i.e., the collective years of experience with seismic programs worldwide that the hand-picked staff brings to the table.
"The people there have many years of experience internationally," said Steve Nicandros, chief executive officer of Frontera, which brought the company on board for the Georgia program. "That experience gives us confidence in their ability to execute our planned program."
Frontera's focus is onshore in emerging markets, where it concentrates on finding opportunities in known hydrocarbon basins. The planned seismic program in eastern Georgia will zero in on four areas: two of these cover existing fields and two are associated with undrilled exploration prospects.
"We're bringing in Global to reduce the risk in these focus areas where we'll shoot more than 300 miles (500 km) of 2-D seismic," said Reggie Spiller, executive vice-president E&P at Frontera. "The 2-D will essentially help us designate new drilling locations.
"We want to acquire enough seismic over these areas to enhance our current mapping of existing prospects as well as our understanding of the size of one of our existing undeveloped fields.
"We shot a 3-D over our Taribani field, and we're now using 2-D to image our vision of where the field seems to extend off the survey we acquired in 1999," Spiller added.
"Two-D is still a good tool and a cost-effective way to understand how large our field may actually be and to determine where to focus our future effort and attention."
For the Georgia shoot, the weather likely may pose some of the biggest challenges.
"The crew may try to work through the winter," Degner said. "This will take specialized equipment because with the snow and the cold you need the right gear. The risk assessment has been done," he said, "and we have a full-time HSE advisor on the crew and access to the Frontera infrastructure that's already in place."

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