1-Apr-05 7:00 AM  CST  

President's Column -- April, 2005 

President's Column


The Future of
Exploration and Production Geophysics
Dan Ebrom, Prior Past President

As Yogi Berra said, “Prediction is difficult; especially about the future”. I find myself now in the 25th year of my geophysical career. Given the performance of my investment portfolio, I will apparently be working for another 25 years! From this mid-career view, I can see where E&P geophysics were when I started my career and look ahead to where they might be in the next quarter century.

An all too common failing of technology predictions is that they ignore the actions of markets.  A future where all technologies are developed simultaneously to their fullest extent is unlikely. Markets force a prioritization of activities. Simply stated, market forces recognize that there is never enough time, money, and manpower to do everything. Those technologies with the biggest payoff, are quickest to implement, and cost the least will develop preferentially relative to technologies that have less payoff, take longer to implement, and cost more..

Hence, I do not foresee a future of widespread high-density, multi-azimuth, multicomponent 3D exploration seismic surveys with triclinic-anisotropic elastic prestack multiple suppression and depth migration. (!) Rather, individual technologies will develop in those economic niches in which they provide immediate value.

In 1980, I was lucky enough to work on one of the early commercial 3D seismic surveys (the Villahermosa field). The conventional wisdom of the day was that 3D seismics was too expensive to ever be used in exploration and would remain limited to field development. 3D did eventually break out into the exploration world because it survived long enough to break out because it delivered immediate value in the field development niche.

Caveats invoked, here’s my list of contenders for E&P geophysical technologies of the future

1. Direct hydrocarbon saturation indicators: Now that prestack depth migration and surface related multiple elimination (SRME) have reduced structural risk, there is a crying need for similar reduction in hydrocarbon risk. We need to avoid drilling non-economic concentrations of hydrocarbons. There are at least three ways to accomplish this: 1) 3-term AVO to obtain density, 2) joint P wave and mode-converted S-wave amplitude inversion to obtain density, and 3) controlled source electromagnetics (CSEM) to directly measure resistivity. The second two have substantial depth limitations, but there is potential with each to see deeper.

2. Increased low frequencies in seismic sources: This will permit imaging beneath basalt and salt, but should also result in AVO response from deep targets.

3. Autonomous recording units (“nodes”): These are already available for deepwater applications from at least two commercial vendors. This is a technology that allows almost total flexibility of receiver effort. The big driver right now is the hydrophone/vertical geophone (PZ sum) combination to reduce water column reverberations. I also appreciate that the horizontal components with their S-wave information come along for free.

4. Permanent instrumentation: The 3D seismic surveys that were conducted at 4-month intervals at Valhall field succeeded in detecting subtle production-related reflectivity changes. Permanent downhole geophones could also be used to detect microseismic activity between surveys as well as provide time-lapse VSPs with each re-shoot of the 3D seismic.

5. New methods of inferring pore pressure and integrating with the full geological model: Pore pressures determine where economic hydrocarbon column heights can exist and which paths to those reservoirs are drillable. Right now, the scalar world of the geophysicist’s pore pressure is decoupled from the structural interpretations of the geologist, and the stress tensor of the drilling engineer. With pore pressures derivable from S-wave velocities, mode-converted S-wave velocities, and possibly P-wave attributes (in addition to P-wave velocities), these data will link to one another.

6. Desk-top stereoscopic visualization without glasses: This technology was showcased in a recent GSH spring symposium. If every interpreter was able to continually visualize his/her prospect in stereoscopic 3D, the cycle time savings would be staggering.

In discussing these technologies with Leon Thomsen, he reminded me that it would have been difficult or impossible to have come up with this list of technologies even five years ago. So, almost certainly, there will be incredibly important E&P geophysical technologies developed over the next couple of decades which are not anyone’s radar screen right now. That’s the kind of wonderful uncertainty that gets me going in the morning, waiting to see what that day will reveal.

See you in the future!

 

For additional information on this Newsletter article, please contact:

John Sumner
(713) 666-7655

Source: GSH Newsletter
http://www.gshtx.org

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