WesternGeco GeoSolutions: The ‘Five I’s’

The Five I’s are a neat way of encapsulating the range of what WesternGeco GeoSolutions delivers.

Illumination is critical to success Suitable acquisition geometries must be designed to enable the subsurface to be seen. This includes consideration of offsets, azimuths, signal/noise and bandwidth, and requires close collaboration with the E&P asset team. Q-Technology point-receiver seismic hardware and software enables a broad range of flexibility and creativity for designing surveys to deliver the best possible answer. Offshore, WesternGeco has proved the value of the Coil Shooting single-vessel full-azimuth acquisition technique and is now applying even more innovative acquisition geometries such as Dual Coil Shooting. On land, the UniQ integrated point-receiver land seismic system today provides over 150,000 channels and this capacity will rise in the future.

Imaging to ensure the Earth model is as accurate as possible, reducing risk while drilling, maximizing reserves, and optimizing production. The WesternGeco toolbox is broader and more advanced than most others; for example, our full waveform inversion (FWI) algorithm is now being applied to commercial projects, including the E-Wave advanced imaging project, which is focused on enhancing the quality of imaging complex geology in the Gulf of Mexico.

Integration includes combining different measurements such as VSP and electromagnetic, gravity and magnetic data to produce the best possible Earth model. As part of Schlumberger, the increasing diversity of software capabilities within Petrel seismic-to-simulation software provides WesternGeco with a significant advantage in integrating different types of data.

Inversion is required to get the best value from seismic data, providing rock and reservoir fluid properties in addition to a structural model. This process requires broad bandwidth data and robust amplitude control all the way from field acquisition and recording to the final product. From the outset our inversion services teams contribute to initial project design and modeling, and throughout the data processing and depth imaging phases to ensure the data are optimized for inversion. We provide a wide range of inversion and quantitative interpretation techniques and tools to address acoustic and elastic inversion, rock physics analysis, and reservoir property modeling.

Interpretation, while ultimately the responsibility of an E&P company, is enhanced when the interpreter has all the information he or she needs to best understand the data. This is most effective when the people preparing and delivering the data also have a good understanding of the geology.