Despite studies that suggest that airguns have little impact on marine mammals, government regulations worldwide continue to get more stringent. This has spurred interest in a more benign marine source: the marine vibrator.

Marine vibrators are not a particularly new concept, but the ones that have been developed to date are nowhere close to replacing airguns in marine seismic surveys. Why? According to James Andersen, president and CEO of GPUSA Inc., it’s because developers are overthinking the problem.

Andersen displayed his alternative system at the recent Society of Exploration Geophysicists conference and met a woman from a major oil company who had been sent to the show to analyze the progress on marine vibrators. “She told me, ‘I’ve looked at what they’re doing, and they just don’t seem practical,’” he said. “I agreed, and I showed her what we’re doing. She said, ‘That’s so simple. I really think that’s the way it ought to be.’”

Andersen’s background as a naval engineering officer, which led to jobs at companies like Westinghouse and Litton, made him quite familiar with the technology being used to build marine vibrators. “When I heard there was interest in marine vibrators, I looked into it,” he said. “I realized that this was the same technology that we were using in the ’80s.”

So Andersen tried a different approach. Rather than using magnets and ceramics to create the vibration, he’s using a servo motor, common in automated factories, to drive pistons. The housing actually is a radial tire with flexible sidewalls to be able to accommodate the motion.

“What we’re doing is just so simple,” he said. “When we explain it to people, they say, ‘How is it possible that nobody’s ever done this before.’”

Another interesting facet is the fact that Andersen is trying crowd funding for his project rather than chasing venture capital. He got the idea from a Forbes Online article that predicts that crowd funding will outpace venture capital by year-end 2016.

Just before press time, an investor who contacted him through the site had agreed to fund the entire amount.

“Life is great, isn’t it?” he said.

Ironically, the first test of the system will likely be on land. Andersen said that operators running vertical seismic profiles (VSPs) in areas where vibrator trucks aren’t practical will dig a pit, line it, fill it with water and put in an airgun for the source. Not surprisingly, this is a rather messy procedure since the airgun tends to blow the water out of the pit. It’s also not a particularly
repeatable source.

“When they do a VSP with a Vibroseis truck, they’ll do it over and over to get the best signal-to-noise ratio,” he said. “An airgun is different each time, so they can’t really stack the data.

“One company is interested in putting our system in the tank and running it 10 times. They’ve told me they’ll get beautiful images.”

Obviously Andersen is a long way from commercial production. But it’s interesting to see a company approach a problem in a completely novel fashion.

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