In this issue you will find a feature on seismic data processing. Processing has really taken off in the past few years, aided by faster compute power and technology transfer from other industries such as gaming.

But the basic adage behind processing has always been “garbage in, garbage out” (or any number of variations of the word “garbage”). In other words, if raw data is of poor quality, there is not much that even the cleverest processor can do to render the final product useful.

However, I recently attended a client meeting hosted by Spectrum Geo, and I guess it could be argued that the company brings another adage – “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” – to the data processing arena. Working with vintage data, Spectrum can shed new light on prospective areas without shooting a single line of new seismic data, although that often will be the final result.

I met with Ted Stieglitz, software development and business development manager, and Andy Cuttell, executive vice president, to discuss the company and its business model. Spectrum has been a processing shop for a long time, and more recently it has begun offering multiclient datasets. In both cases it has experience working with vintage datasets, which Stieglitz referred to as “datasets with opportunity.”

According to Stieglitz, “There’s a significant cost differential between reworking vintage data versus acquiring new data. Obviously people would like to have new data all the time. But there can be a 10-to-1 difference in cost.”

Spectrum’s multiclient model is to find frontier areas that are planning licensing rounds, track down all of the existing data, and use the latest processing methods to improve data quality. In terms of processing technology, Spectrum has a wide offering of technical solutions, but it does not rely on any special tricks to improve the value of vintage data.

“I don’t think the issue is having tools in your toolbox,” Stieglitz said. “I think the issue is having good geophysicists who know how to work the data, know the geologic basin, and have the technical maturity to be able to think creatively to extract the most out of the data.”

On the client side, he added, often the data exists in house, and even though new surveys might be planned, Spectrum starts with the vintage data.

“Any time you have a working petroleum system, there’s always an opportunity to revisit it,” he said.

What Spectrum brings to the table that makes it an attractive partner is what Stieglitz refers to as “forensic geophysics,” the willingness to start from scratch rather than work with preprocessed data. “I would prefer to work with the rawest form of the data,” he said. “I want to begin with raw field tapes (if possible).”

Finding those original field tapes can be a daunting challenge as mergers and acquisitions have wreaked havoc on tape libraries. In one instance, Cuttell said, a project in the North Sea required five 3-D surveys to be merged together. The field tapes were in one location, the navigation tapes in another, and the paper data were elsewhere still. This was true for each survey, meaning that data had to be culled from 15 locations.

“It was chaos trying to sort that out,” Cuttell said. “It took nearly nine months to get all of the pieces together.”

It is this kind of detective work that keeps oil companies on the client list. Their internal geophysicists might know how to work the data quite well, but being willing to find it in the first place could prove too time-consuming.

“When it comes to getting a box of tapes and you have to sort through all of the geometry information, do all of the legwork to find the history, figure out what you’ve archived, and try to fix that dataset, it’s very expensive, and usually it’s more cost-effective for the client to send that work out,” Stieglitz said. “We’re always looking for opportunities where we can add value.”