Targeting bypassed pay to extend the life of a mature field

Overview
A Q-Marine survey was performed over a mature field in the Brent Province of the northern North Sea. The field is operated by a large independent oil company and has been in production since the 1980s. The operator wanted to use newly acquired seismic data to improve their characterization of the interwell region and so target bypassed pay. This approach would help to maximize recoverable reserves and extend the economic life of the field.

The field structure is a tilted and eroded horst block in which the dipping Jurassic Brent reservoir is trapped against a sealing fault. Lateral closure is provided by a series of faults that lie perpendicular to the main fault. The operator believed that there was bypassed pay in thin sand units located within narrow fault blocks. These small blocks could not be identified from conventional seismic data because they lacked high-frequency content. The operators selected Q-Technology to rectify this problem.