Tuesday 28 November 2023

PGS is pioneering marine seismic solutions for evolving energy needs and adapting hydrocarbon exploration acquisition configurations for offshore wind and CCS. Here we revisit modern towed-streamer acquisition configurations and illustrate how the same concepts have recently been used to design and acquire the first large CCS development surveys as well as ultra-high resolution 3D site surveys for offshore wind farms.

The demand for high- and ultra-high-resolution 3D towed-streamer seismic has increased due to a shift towards near-field hydrocarbon exploration and the increasing need for 3D seismic as part of the energy transition. Improved seismic data quality, better spatial sampling, higher trace density, and improved near-offset coverage is needed. 3D seismic data is also required for carbon capture and storage (CCS) development projects, site surveying for offshore wind farms, marine mineral exploration, and nuclear waste management.

These relatively new applications require shallow subsurface targets to be imaged with high-resolution data of the near surface and even the seabed. The shallower the targets the more important the near offset coverage and dense spatial sampling in 3D seismic acquisition becomes. Both factors are cost drivers and thus advanced technologies and solutions are needed to enable cost-effective 3D acquisition. Innovative towing configurations that combine wide-tow multi sources with multisensor streamer spreads have become the new standard for hydrocarbon exploration in Northern Europe. These acquisition solutions enable accurate imaging from very shallow targets and geohazards to deep geological structures in a cost-effective manner.

The improved near-offset coverage and the dense spatial sampling provided by the wide-tow multi-source configurations enable subsurface imaging with temporal and spatial resolution in the meter range. Equivalent survey design concepts have recently been utilized for high-resolution site characterization for carbon storage or ultra-high-resolution 3D site surveying for offshore wind farms.

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