Seismic technology lets oil companies look below the salt domes

Fuel Fix:

For decades, the giants of the oil industry were confounded by salt.

While oil companies for years had shot sound waves into the deep to help create images of undersea geology, salt located far under the floor of the Gulf of Mexico was unpredictable. It muffled reflections, or bounced them away from survey vessels, leaving geophysicists in the dark.

But that was before a series of recent seismic imaging breakthroughs involving supercomputers and the largest moving objects in the ocean. The advancements helped oil companies peek under salt layers located miles below the Gulf and have spurred a number of discoveries and billions of dollars in new investment in offshore oil production.

“It’s like a medical imaging experiment that we’re all familiar with when they take an ultrasound and show us an image of the baby, only it’s done on a planetary scale,” said Craig Beasley, chief geophysicist for Schlumberger’s WesternGeco subsidiary.

Using the new and evolving methods, oil companies have found ways to shoot sound miles below the surface and capture more echoes of those sound waves than they ever have. 

Teams of mathematicians, geophysicists and software engineers use large computer systems to translate those echoes into three-dimensional images of reserves more than six miles below ocean, rock layers and salt, a feat that was little more than a dream a decade ago. 

The innovations have helped oil companies tap into some of the largest offshore oil reserves ever discovered and are a big reason why four towering oil platforms were under construction this summer at a single yard in Ingleside near Corpus Christi. The platforms are the culmination of multibillion dollar projects to extract oil from reservoirs that would have been challenging to target prior to seismic imaging advances.

“If the seismic had stayed the same as it was in 1999 and 2000…today we would be effectively drilling in the dark,” said John Etgen, BP’s distinguished adviser for seismic imaging.

Beasley said salt previously created havoc in seismic images.
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There is much more.

With the cost of drilling in the deep water Gulf. it would be too expensive to take chances on finding oil without this technology.  That is why it is so important to turn this technology loose in prospects off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.  Not doing so would be irresponsible.