The concepts of multicomponent acquisition have been bandied about the seismic dinner table for decades. Now contractors are trying to serve up solid helpings of the technology.

While perhaps not generating the evening news-type splash of 4D seismic, multicomponent seismic (also known as 3C onshore and 4C offshore) has had its share of salivating press over the past few years as well-known technical examples receive utmost attention at exhibits and trade shows. But a slump in the seismic market, combined with questions about the industry's ability to fully understand the complexities of the technology, have kept oil company demand at a simmer, at best.
Hart Publications assembled a group of multicomponent researchers as well as representatives from seismic equipment manufacturers and contractors at the recent annual meeting of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists to discuss the current and future markets for multicomponent. Among those present were Marc Lawrence of Fairfield Industries; Steve Roche from Output Exploration; Robin Walker of Schlumberger; Colin Murdoch of Veritas DGC; Kevin Callaghan from Seitel; Ian Jack and Bob Smith from BP; Jack Caldwell from Core Lab; and Simon Spitz and Bert Chenin of CGG. Later, Michael Saur from PGS also shared his thoughts. One of many topics discussed was how long ultimate industry acceptance of the technology is likely to take.
Hart's E&P: Is it desirable for multicomponent acquisition to become affordable enough to be used on a routine basis? Or will it continue to be most useful in niche applications?
Saur: It is our view that the value of multicomponent technology will be fully realized as the tools to interpret the final deliverables mature. This, coupled with continued efficiency advances in acquisition, will make the technology applicable in more than just niche applications.
Callaghan: As more disciplines become aware of and can make use of the information provided by multicomponent, so the demand will increase. Where acquisition constraints now mandate an ocean-bottom cable (OBC) solution to acquiring seismic, in the very near future 4C will be acquired as a matter of course and will be the standard method for OBC. Deepwater areas that currently are a challenge for 3D-4C will become viable and provide large new areas that are of even greater interest to oil companies. Reservoir development will require the use of 4C to fully realize the potential of a field, mandating the use of the technique just as 3D is mandated today.
Walker: We as an industry have to come up with some method where we can take it from being almost an academic sideshow to being part of the business process. And the simple step-change to us is that the asset manager needs to make some substantial savings during his tenure of the asset, because if I'm him, there's no reason for me to do something if the guy who replaces the guy who replaces me reaps the reward - I could make much better use of that (US) $10 million by putting it right in my pocket. So we have to get the return within the tenure of the individual so that he gets the motivation and the crown of laurel leaves, not the crown of thorns.
Spitz: It's important that some people take some risks and put some investment to show that these things are possible. Until people take those risks, multicomponent will stay at the R&D phase.
Walker: Until it can impact the business process, why should one service company or oil company take a bath in order to do a public service to prove to the world it works? If I develop something and it works, the last thing I'm going to do is tell everyone it works.
Spitz: We as contractors don't try to compete with the people who are our customers. I think the first goal of a contractor is to prove that there is a market and then ensure market share.
Jack: It's of very little value to us if we can't get easy access to it.
Chenin: Our challenge is to convince the industry of the benefits.
Hart's E&P: You said you need to create the market and then ensure market share. How are you going to do that?
Spitz: If multicomponent is going to be marketable, it has to be profitable. So we try to market it from the point of view that sometimes it's a good solution in some situations, that some processing can be done to solve these problems.
Walker: It's based on your ambition. The surveys we shot with Seitel - one may argue that it was structural imaging beneath gas and was fairly simplistic stuff for 4C, but still it gave very valuable imaging, and we turned it around fairly quickly. Then we started playing with it because we'd already gotten into the playing-with-it mode, anisotropy, AVO, etc. So we thought we'd do it with 4C as well. We got into microexperimental mode very quickly.
Spitz: The point is that somehow we're trying to measure the shear waves, and we're certain that some of the things we're detecting we can image with P-waves as well. Alba is a perfect example because we want to see the sands with the converted waves, but I think it can be argued that you can see the sands with the P-waves alone. It's very subtle. But the earth is not made of liquid. How we go from the R&D phase to the market is really not obvious. But it's sure we'll have to get more than what we get with P-waves.
Caldwell: You can go back to the late '70s and early '80s when all of the major oil companies had shear wave groups to examine this. The physics involved has not changed; people understood them as well then as we do now. The necessary suite of tools wasn't there then, and it isn't here now to get the ultimate content from the data. This is about the fourth incarnation of shear waves. Will it go beyond a niche this time? Hopefully, but we need to develop the interpretational and analytical technology. We have people throughout the industry who are either recently retired or are about to retire who understand all of this stuff pretty well.
Chenin: Making multicomponent work is an economic challenge, and there are two ways to do it. We can lower the cost, or we can increase the value. Increasing the value is to convert this technology and data into direct benefit for the customer. So the challenge on our side is to develop better processing and better tools and translate that technology into benefits. If we can do this, the additional cost makes sense.
In the future we'll use multicomponent technology to build an image of the subsurface properties, geophysical and petrophysical properties. We don't just want to look at seismic data; we want to look at all the data.
Murdoch: Perhaps when we're able to do that, people will assign more value to it. At the end of the day, what's the difference? From the exploration side, if you get the same information from the start, that's what you want. You want to be able to say there's the rock, there's the reservoir, there's this much oil.
Spitz: I'm amazed at what the reservoir engineers are trying to build with their reservoir models. It looks to me like witchcraft.
Walker: I'm sure the reservoir engineers would say that what we do is witchcraft.
Roche: But they're starving for the information we provide.
Caldwell: It does lead to an interesting question - if we're going to be two or three or four steps removed from the actual data, can we modify our behavior quickly enough to accept that within our careers, or is acceptance going to take much longer, 15 years before someone will look at these interpretive displays significantly removed from the actual data, rather than, say, a time slice?
Hart's E&P: I think that's the direction that the whole visualization concept is moving.
Murdoch: It reduces the number of people needed because they can work in that kind of visualization environment, and the costs go down.
Caldwell: And then accountants and lawyers can be put in those positions as well.
Smith: You all seem to talk as if conventional seismic or 3D seismic has solved all of our problems. But we still have surprises. We don't actually know all of the information that's down there, and as we look to the future, where we're going into deeper and deeper water, we're going to take some very big risks and drill some very expensive wells, developments that will have to be different from the types of things we now see as challenges. In that type of environment we can't afford to make too many mistakes.
Walker: The way we use data today - you don't calibrate source output or receivers, but it doesn't matter because you're going to equalize it all anyway, stack it and throw away the amplitudes. It's a downward spiral. Then we say you should pay us lots of money for this. As soon as you've stacked something, you're left with one-sixtieth of the information. If you're only using 2% of the information, you can't expect to extract everything from it.
Lawrence: And just as companies moved to deeper water, there will be an increasing number of companies looking at the deeper section on the (Outer) Continental Shelf. Their questions to us are going to be can I reduce my risk by using shear wave data? Where's the depth limitation with shear wave? We certainly know the frequency limitations of resolving certain things at depth with P-waves. You get the broad outline of the structure, and certainly the deep wells will have to go after something structurally, but what's the lithology? What's the chances of finding something?
Right now in the Gulf of Mexico, less than 1% of all wells were drilled below 16,000ft to 17,000ft (4,877m to 5,182m). There are tremendous deep structures that we're seeing on all of our 3D sets below those depths. No one's really going after them yet. If this technology can reduce that risk, give them some information, maybe we'll see another exploration horizon open up.
Jack: I've rarely been so excited at the potential of the seismic method made possible by populating all of the azimuth and offset domains. This becomes relatively easy using ocean-bottom technology, which in addition allows full wavefield recording.
The Gulf of Mexico is very limited by poor illumination of structures, and this technology should allow us to achieve significant improvements. But it's a very conservative industry, and with good reason. We'll retain the processes that we know and move forward gradually into the unknown.
Saur: It's true our industry is a conservative industry, one that is slow to fully embrace new technology. The use of 3D seismic is an example of this. There is no reason to think that it will be significantly different for multicomponent technology.