Four years ago Spectrum Geo brought in several new people at the senior management level. That decision is starting to pay serious dividends for the company.

Spectrum announced a deal July 1 that will make it the owner of the world’s largest 2-D multiclient library and a major player in the 3-D multiclient space. The purchase of Fugro’s multiclient library, for a total of $115 million, doubled the company’s 2-D library and increased its existing 3-D library by 700%.

The 2-D library now comprises more than 3.3 million line km (2 million line miles) and contains 587 datasets spanning 67 offshore territories. Spectrum’s data library now spans all of the major sedimentary basins and 3,640 oil fields worldwide. It is estimated to cover 42% of the world’s known offshore hydrocarbon reserves, and as Spectrum’s geoscientists begin to examine the data for reprocessing opportunities, that number could grow.

Wow. These are big numbers for what began as a small processing shop in the U.K. in 1986. When I first encountered the company, it owned one seismic vessel (which it later terminated) but mostly focused on reprocessing legacy data to define new leads for its
clients. That changed in 2012 when the company acquired its first multiclient 2-D seismic survey. Since then it has continued to grow
its library organically through ambitious projects like its Pelotas Basin survey offshore Brazil and Uruguay and its recently announced collaboration with Schlumberger and PGS to acquire 80,000 km to 100,000 km (50,000 miles to 62,000 miles) of long-offset 2-D data encompassing all of the major hydrocarbon provinces offshore Mexico.

“Our vision was to become a major multiclient seismic player, and that’s what we are now,” said CEO Rune Eng. “We’re certainly in Division 1 and approaching a library that is of such a size that it’s comparable to the bigger players like TGS, PGS and WesternGeco.”

Like TGS, Spectrum owns no vessels, preferring to charter them from other companies. “Our business model is to focus on the projects,” Eng said. “We believe in the project and not necessarily in the steel.” For Eng, the type of cooperation in the Mexico survey represents “the flavor of the industry.” “If you have limited budgets from oil companies, it’s better to have cooperation than competing head-to-head in typical multiclient areas like Mexico,” he said. “We think this makes a lot of sense.

“We expect that the prospectivity in the Mexican part of the Gulf is probably as good as it is in the U.S. Pemex has done quite a
lot, but I think it’s time to move on,” he said.

The timing of the purchase might seem odd given the current low-price environment, and Eng acknowledged that the multiclient market can be as vulnerable to reduced exploration spending as any other part of the seismic industry. However, he said, “The multiclient model is robust in terms of the adaptation to market fluctuations. Spectrum does not own any vessels, and we will, in a downturn, preserve cash by reducing investments that carry high risk while focusing on sales of our existing database.”

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