There is a growing need for today's exploration and development seismic activities to dramatically reduce the turnaround time for both vessel deliverables and final results. Quite literally time is money, especially when shooting a 4D survey to correctly place infill wells to enhance field production. Seismic turnaround reduction significantly improves the overall return on assets.
In a recent independent survey of global energy companies 46% reported that they feel that it takes far too long to deliver the results of 4D surveys once commissioned. 59% of those surveyed indicated the desire to have a 4D difference image as soon as the survey was completed.
To meet this challenge, WesternGeco have developed and now commercialised their Q-Xpress • service for the Q-Marine system. The service and deliverables from Q-Xpress are now available on the entire fleet of Q-Marine vessels: Geco Topaz; Western Pride; Western Neptune; Western Regent and Geco Searcher.
Based on extensive technology and process innovation, Q-Xpress enables WesternGeco to clearly differentiate themselves from the competition with their data turnaround. Q-Xpress combines the quality/value of Q-Marine seismic with "in acquisition timeframe" deliverables to become the industries preferred reservoir seismic solution provider.
Q-Xpress has been developed around 3 core elements:
- Technology - the Q-Marine system is full integrated with the Omega2 QC, QA and processing systems on the vessel. All processing is done from disk and not tape. Up to 400Gflops of processing power and 50Tb of disk space are now available on all Q-Marine vessels.
- Workflows - the QC, QA and data processing workflows have been redesigned and optimised to enable throughput improvements whilst simplifying their parameterisation.
- Organisation - with WesternGeco superb IT infrastructure, communications between the vessel, onshore DP and clients is greatly enhanced. All Q-Marine vessels operate a 256Kb VSAT link enabling selected test lines and QC results to be shared between the various groups involved. Project planning for data processing can now start ahead of, rather than after, data acquisition.
The above elements ensure that full and complete QC is performed on the vessel and the early stages of the full production-processing route can also be accomplished. There is no need for repeat work in the onshore DP centre, saving valuable time without sacrificing anything in terms of data quality.
Deliverables from the system are:
- Complete data quality control and quality assurance performed on the vessel
- Rapid creation and publication of QC materials via Supervision
- Production data processing workflow possible on the vessel through to and including complex demultiple processing (e.g. SRME)
- High quality reservoir cube delivered off the vessel within a few days of the last shot
- Reservoir services products such as relative acoustic impedance cubes; AVO products; 4D difference images delivered off the vessel
- Dramatically reduced turnaround time for the final data processing products
Q-Xpress in practice
During July and August 2004 the WesternGeco vessel "Geco Topaz" acquired the now regular yearly 4D survey over the Norne field offshore Norway. Q-Xpress enabled WesternGeco to deliver the survey results to the client in an industry record timeframe:
- Two days and seven hours after the last shot was acquired, processing and 4D differencing was completed on the vessel.
- 12 hours later, the data had been inverted, on the vessel, to create a relative acoustic impedance cube.
- The data were ready for 1st interpretation two days and 17 hours after completion of acquisition.
- Data were delivered to the client merely four days after acquisition was completed.
Q-Marine has proven to deliver the data quality; Q-Xpress now guarantees it's delivered fast.
* Mark of WesternGeco