Four WesternGeco vessels work on wide-azimuth acquisition. The operation is vessel-intensive but provides better subsalt images. (Photo courtesy of WesternGeco)

Three-dimensional seismic has arguably been one of the biggest technological breakthroughs in oil and gas exploration and production. Is there another game-changing geophysical breakthrough afoot?

The answer, according to Mike Bahorich, executive vice president of E&P technology at Apache Corp., is “no.” “There is no innovation of that caliber,” Bahorich said

Tuesday during a webcast titled “Frontiers in Geophysical Technology.” “There are a number of wonderful innovations out there, but they’re not going to have the impact that we’ve seen from 3-D seismic. That’s an incredibly high bar.”

However, there are many intriguing technological advances in geophysics, he said. One is marine wide-azimuth seismic. “One of the things that higher channel counts have enabled us to do is get a broader view of the subsurface. You might even think of it as a bigger ‘antenna,’” he said. “Wide-azimuth as it’s been applied to marine seismic enables us to get a much sharper image of the subsurface. I think that’s a technology that’s emerging now that is very exciting.”

On land, Bahorich said, slip-sweep acquisition is increasing the number of shots since it allows the next shot to begin before the last one is finished. “Recently in Egypt we had, I believe, the highest shots per day ever recorded on land,” he said. “We had a shot coming in every 5 seconds throughout the entire day.”

An additional benefit in land acquisition is the emergence of new cableless systems that use flash technology. These systems can be scaled to any size shoot necessary and are particularly useful in areas of infrastructure (neighborhoods, for instance) or areas that are environmentally sensitive.

Finally, he said, there have been major advances in seismic processing, including improvements in the ability to do joint inversion of seismic and electromagnetic data and also reverse time migration, which is “a more accurate depiction of the wave equation technology and enables us to get sharper images of the subsurface.”