It is a bit of a conundrum for seismic contractors that they are shouldering an increasing responsibility for technology development yet can't rush something to the market before the market is ready for it.
For oil companies, the downturn of 1998 is a distant memory, replaced by phenomenal profits in 2000 and uncertainty in 2001. Still, prices hovering in the US $20/bbl range are a huge improvement over the $10/bbl oil that plagued the industry in the late 1990s.
That downturn, however, never really eased up for the seismic industry. For the first time ever, its earnings failed to be a harbinger for the fortunes of its clients; an upturn in oil prices was not foreshadowed by any surge in seismic activity. Oil companies beefed up their balance sheets while seismic contractors wondered when it would ever be their turn to join the feast.
But savvy contractors didn't stop looking for newer, better ways to image the subsurface. A host of new technologies has been under development these past few years, and oil companies willing to try something different are likely to find that the resulting data yields quite a bit more useful information.
Hart's E&P talked to Diz Mackewn, president of PGS Geophysical, to discuss some of the exciting seismic advances awaiting industry acceptance and how the seismic contracting industry can reap some of the benefits of its research and development.
New approaches
Marine seismic surveys seem to be experiencing improvements across the board. The mid- to late 1990s saw a tremendous increase in the number of streamers deployed as well as the length of those streamers, but that exponential growth has slowed in recent years as different deployment methods have been studied. PGS invested heavily in its Ramform vessels, designed to tow as many as 20 streamers and to ride out heavier seas with a revamped hull design.
"Recently one Ramform completed the industry's first 16-streamer job, confirming the large streamer-deployment capacity of these vessels," said Mackewn. "But they have a 20-streamer capability, and it's there for a reason. While the industry standard today is to deploy the streamers 100 m (328 ft) apart using two alternating seismic sources, these vessels have the potential to deploy up to 20 streamers at half or even quarter that distance in single-source mode, so you get a double improvement. You get an improvement in signal-to-noise ratio, and you also get improvement in resolution, or spatial imaging capability."
PGS calls this high-density 3-D, or HD3D, and Mackewn said it has applications in reservoir characterization and time-lapse studies. "High-density 3-D data allows geoscientists and engineers to extract more accurate production-related information," he said. "Another trend in the market is the use of longer offsets, but with this number of cables in the water, getting longer offsets can be quite expensive, plus you have the problems of feathering and infill. To overcome this obstacle, PGS has developed a technology called the continuous long offset, which allows the vessel to trail 20 6-km (3.7-mile) streamers and, by using a second source vessel, effectively achieve 12-km (7.5-mile) offsets without the operational hazard of towing streamers with a physical length of 12 km."
Data processing also has seen tremendous improvements in recent years, with high-end imaging processes such as true amplitude prestack time and depth migration yielding more accurate subsurface images, including enhanced vertical and lateral resolution.
Visualization is regarded by many as one of the key future technologies in the industry. PGS recently developed a virtual reality visualization system called holoSeis, said Mackewn, and while many service companies sell this type of software, PGS has focused on implementing the technology for internal use. This approach allows the company to exploit the advantages in efficiency and quality by the extensive use of holoSeis in such things as acquisition quality control (QC), processing QC, velocity model building for prestack depth migration and first break picking for statics solutions.
Other technologies are moving more slowly, and multicomponent acquisition is one that continues to show promise but is awaiting wider acceptance. "We feel we've been a leader in the multicomponent market, but we're waiting for the market to arrive," Mackewn said. "It's an expensive technology, and we don't see the market growing to any extent until it's proved on technologically acceptable results. There are some extremely good results, but there have also been some disappointments. That means oil companies are unwilling to take that technology risk yet."
No pain, no gain
Of course, if no company ever took any technology risk, no new technology would ever be developed. So seismic contractors walk a tightrope between being fiscally conservative enough to remain in business and having technology affordably available when the industry is ready for it. This is no easy task.
Their greatest success story is 3-D seismic, still touted by the majority of oil companies as the single most enabling technology development of the past several decades. But it's also a classic example of a technology that was available long before it was widely accepted as an exploration tool. Were oil companies too uneducated to realize its potential? No - it was just too expensive.
"We believe that technology take-up has to do with the price at which you can offer it to the industry," Mackewn said. "We wouldn't like that to be the case, but that is the reality. So our efforts have been geared toward improving efficiency to make some of these technologies affordable."
For instance, the industry started using towed streamers for marine 3-D seismic surveys in the 1970s, but it took time for the concept to become widely accepted. "It was only when the price started to come down that it really took off," he said. Once the unit price dropped, the industry quickly expanded from one or two streamers to multiple-streamer surveys.
While he admitted PGS was willing to take the risk to help drive that price down, he also said the company has to focus on the "here and now" market while keeping a careful eye on the future. "The future is there, and we can see it coming," he said. "But it doesn't come quite as fast as we'd like it to sometimes."
Seismic contractors face an additional hurdle because theirs is a highly competitive market, and many analysts argue it is perhaps oversaturated with players. Mackewn said this competitive marketplace is another stress on the risk-reward model and tends to create a bottleneck in the technology pipeline. Again, the best response is to make the new technology more affordable and efficient.
"We've seen that that's the way you build the market up rather than sitting around and complaining about the situation as it is," he said.
But it also will behoove the oil industry to pay more for the right technology and not settle for a cheap substitute just because it costs less. "If they go for a cheap solution that doesn't deliver what they want, the risk of failure is quite large," he said. "Then we're in a vicious cycle for the technology to get the credibility that it should."
The next step-change
If there's a technology with the potential to impact the industry the way 3-D seismic has, it probably already is being used, Mackewn said. Multicomponent and time-lapse seismic have the potential to be more widely used as prices come down. And Mackewn said multicomponent will have the same impact as 3-D in some areas, though it's not quite as widely applicable. Multicomponent also will face growing pains because the processing and interpretation issues are different than standard compressional-wave seismic, and the industry is still facing a steep learning curve despite improved computer technology. This is similar to the early days of 3-D processing and interpretation, when it sometimes wasn't clear whether poor results were due to bad data or an incorrect assumption made during processing.
Still further advances in 3-D streamer technology remain to be exploited as well, Mackewn said. "We believe high-density 3-D allows more information to be extracted from 3-D streamer data than the current practice. There is a potential to explore the predictive capabilities of 3-D seismic data in the early exploration phase, thereby reducing risk early on."
A fast-growing area in the industry is 4-D or time-lapse surveying - using seismic to monitor production from the reservoirs. Already time-lapse surveys are used fairly routinely in the North Sea, while interest is growing in other parts of the world, particularly the Gulf of Mexico. Data integration will continue to impact the industry as well, Mackewn predicted, as people from different disciplines become more accustomed to standing in the same room looking at the same information.
Of course, seismic contractors don't operate in a vacuum, and larger industry issues will certainly affect the market's acceptance of new technologies. Mackewn said one of the key drivers during the next few years will be an increasing gap between oil and gas supply and demand as reserve replacement becomes more difficult. Eventually the hiatus in technology development will have to be overcome, he said, to narrow that gap.
Meanwhile, he predicted a change in the business model of seismic contractors. "I think that pure seismic play companies are going to be difficult to find," he said. "You might see more hybrids appearing. The whole risk-reward model will have to change to make sense of our business."
Already many seismic companies are retooling to offer more reservoir expertise, and as reservoir characterization tools such as time-lapse, multicomponent and permanently installed sensors become more common, seismic contractors may be the natural repositories of that expertise.
Additionally, further consolidation is likely. "This business is overcompetitive. There's an overcapacity, and supply and demand have to get in balance," Mackewn said. "It's a strange situation when the oil companies are doing well and the seismic companies aren't."

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