First Break December 2020 - Delivering for Energy Challenge: Today and Tomorrow

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SPECIAL TOPIC

Delivering for the Energy Challenge: Today and Tomorrow EAGE NEWS Get ready for first online Annual Conference TECHNICAL ARTICLE Pre-stack inversion in the Nile Dela

Gas-oil contact: Inferred from TL-FWI

Oil-water contact: NPD database

Well

Depth slice through high-definition 65 Hz time-lag FWI velocity model refines extent of the reservoir fluid contacts.

REFINED RESERVOIR IMAGES IN THE BARENTS SEA Superior subsurface understanding with high-frequency time-lag FWI CGG Geoscience – Exceptional People - Remarkable Technology - Outstanding Performance

cgg.com/FWI

FIRST BREAK® An EAGE Publication

CHAIRMAN EDITORIAL BOARD Peter Rowbotham (Peter.Rowbotham@apachecorp.com) EDITOR Damian Arnold (editorfb@eage.org) MEMBERS, EDITORIAL BOARD • Paul Binns, consultant (pebinns@btinternet.com) • Patrick Corbett, Heriot-Watt University (patrick_corbett@pet.hw.ac.uk) • Tom Davis, Colorado School of Mines (tdavis@mines.edu) • Anthony Day, PGS (anthony.day@pgs.com) • Peter Dromgoole, Equinor UK (pdrum@equinor.com) • Rutger Gras, Oranje-Nassau Energy (gras@onebv.com) • Hamidreza Hamdi, University of Calgary (hhamdi@ucalgary.ca) • Ed Kragh, Schlumberger Cambridge Research (edkragh@slb.com) • John Reynolds, Reynolds International (jmr@reynolds-international.co.uk) • James Rickett, Schlumberger (jrickett@slb.com) • Dave Stewart, Dave Stewart Geoconsulting Ltd (djstewart.dave@gmail.com) • Femke Vossepoel, Delft University of Technology (f.c.vossepoel@tudelft.nl) • Angelika-Maria Wulff, Kuwait Oil Company (AWulff@kockw.com) MEDIA PRODUCTION Saskia Nota (sna@eage.org) ACCOUNT MANAGER ADVERTISING Peter Leitner (plr@eage.org) PRODUCTION Saskia Nota (firstbreakproduction@eage.org) Ivana Geurts (firstbreakproduction@eage.org) EAGE EUROPE OFFICE PO Box 59 3990 DB Houten The Netherlands • +31 88 995 5055 • eage@eage.org • www.eage.org EAGE RUSSIA & CIS OFFICE EAGE Russia & CIS Office EAGE Geomodel LLC 19 Leninsky Prospekt 119071, Moscow, Russia • +7 495 640 2008 • moscow@eage.org • www.eage.ru EAGE MIDDLE EAST OFFICE EAGE Middle East FZ-LLC Dubai Knowledge Village Block 13 Office F-25 PO Box 501711 Dubai, United Arab Emirates • +971 4 369 3897 • middle_east@eage.org • www.eage.org EAGE ASIA PACIFIC OFFICE UOA Centre Office Suite 19-15-3A No. 19, Jalan Pinang 50450 Kuala Lumpur Malaysia • +60 3 272 201 40 • asiapacific@eage.org • www.eage.org EAGE AMERICAS SAS Calle 93 # 18-28 Oficina 704 Bogota, Colombia • +57 1 4232948 • americas@eage.org • www.eage.org EAGE MEMBERS CHANGE OF ADDRESS NOTIFICATION Send to: EAGE Membership Dept at EAGE Office (address above)

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Searcher Seismic starts airborne surveys in Western Australia.

Editorial Contents 3

EAGE News

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Crosstalk

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Industry News

Technical Article

37 Reservoir characterization utilizing pre-stack inversion and artificial neural network techniques, Offshore Nile Delta, Egypt

Adel A.A. Othman, Farouk Metwally, Mohamed Fathy and Wael Said 43 Quantifying and reducing uncertainty in play mapping by using information entropy and Bayesian inference

Benjamin Wendebourg, Florian Wellmann and Peter Kukla

Special Topic: D elivering for the Energy Challenge: Today and Tomorrow

51 Smart Exploration inspires innovative geophysical solutions for mineral exploration in Europe Alireza Malehmir, Per Gisselø, Valentina Socco, João Carvalho, Paul Marsden, Asli Onar Verboon6, and Marcin Loska 57 Boosting global OBN performances with predictive software adapted to precision clocks based on low-power OCXOs

Cyril Boissy 61

Preparing for inversion of 3D Seismic Surveys Huw James

67 Accelerating E&P decisions by applying AI to unstructured data

Kim Gunn Mave, Charmyne Mamador and Francois Baillard 71 Integrated 3D seismic interpretation techniques enable definition and assessment of prospects and risk in the Harper Basin Cretaceous fan reservoir play

Felicia Winter and Richard Hedley 75 Recent advances with wide-tow multi-sources in marine seismic streamer acquisition and imaging Martin Widmaier, Rune Tønnessen, Julien Oukili and Carine Roalkvam 81

Why quality control is key Jenni Nicholls and Boff Anderson

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Missed pay or overlooked pay. What if your well wasn’t dry?

Carl Fredrik Gyllenhammar

94 Calendar

FIRST BREAK ON THE WEB www.firstbreak.org ISSN 0263-5046 (print) / ISSN 1365-2397 (online)

cover: Design theme for the 2020 EAGE Annual conference, which this year will be online as a result of the Covid restrictions.

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European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers

Board 2020-2021

Everhard Muijzert President

Dirk Orlowsky Vi c e-President

Pascal Breton Secretary-Treasurer

Near Surface Geoscience Division Alireza Malehmir Chair Esther Bloem Vice-Chair George Apostolopoulos Immediate Past Chair Micki Allen Contact Officer EEGS/North America Riyadh Al-Saad Oil & Gas Liaison Hongzhu Cai Liaison China Albert Casas Membership Officer Eric Cauquil Liaison Shallow Marine Geophysics Deyan Draganov Technical Programme Officer Ranajit Ghose Editor in Chief Near Surface Geophysics Hamdan Ali Hamdan Liaison Middle East Vladimir Ignatief Liaison North America / Russia Andreas Kathage Liaison Officer First Break Musa Manzi Liaison Africa Myrto Papadopoulou Young Professional Liaison Andreas Pfaffhuber Liaison Infrastructure & BIM Koya Suto Liaison Asia Pacific Catherine Truffert Industry Liaison

Oil & Gas Geoscience Division

Caroline Le Turdu Membership and Cooperation Officer

Ingrid Magnus Publications Officer

Colin MacBeth Education Officer

Michael Peter Suess Chair; TPC Lucy Slater Vice-Chair Caroline Jane Lowrey Immediate Past Chair; TPC Erica Angerer Member Wiebke Athmer Member Juliane Heiland TPC Tijmen-Jan Moser Editor-in-chief Geophysical Prospecting Francesco Perrone YP Liaison Philip Ringrose Editor-in-chief Petroleum Geoscience Conor Ryan REvC Liaison Martin Widmaier TPC Aart-Jan van Wijngaarden Technical Programme Officer

SUBSCRIPTIONS First Break is published monthly. It is free to EAGE members. The membership fee of EAGE is € 50.00 a year (including First Break, EarthDoc (EAGE’s geoscience database), Learning Geoscience (EAGE’s Education website) and online access to a scientific journal.

Companies can subscribe to First Break via an institutional subscription.

Every subscription includes a monthly hard copy and online access to the full First Break archive for the requested number of online users.

Aart-Jan van Wijngaarden Technical Programme Officer

Alireza Malehmir Chair Near Surface Geoscience Division

Michael Peter Suess Chair Oil & Gas Geoscience Division

Orders for current subscriptions and back issues should be sent to EAGE Publications BV, Journal Subscriptions, PO Box 59, 3990 DB, Houten, The Netherlands. Tel: +31 (0)88 9955055, E-mail: subscriptions@eage.org, www.firstbreak.org.

First Break is published by EAGE Publications BV, The Netherlands.

However, responsibility for the opinions given and the statements made rests with the authors.

COPYRIGHT & PHOTOCOPYING © 2020 EAGE All rights reserved. First Break or any part thereof may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transcribed in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying and recording, ­without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

PAPER The Publisher’s policy is to use acid-free permanent paper (TCF), to the draft standard ISO/DIS/9706, made from sustainable ­forests using chlorine-free pulp (Nordic-Swan standard).

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HIGHLIGHTS

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Student special for the Annual

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Guide to Artificial Intelligence (Part 2)

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State of the art seabed seismic workshop report

We can make your trip to our first online Annual Conference & Exhibition one to remember!

The Road to Amsterdam has taken a slight detour. This month we all find ourselves at home - safely, we hope ready to participate in the EAGE Annual Conference & Exhibition Online. We still expect to make it to Amsterdam for the 82nd EAGE Annual in June next year, but for now we’re excited to be holding a virtual meeting that can bring together our global geoscience and engineering community before the end of 2020.

It should be an extraordinary week.

Between 8-11 December those register-

Let’s all meet online!

ing for the event can look forward to the specially adapted Technical Programme, Forum Sessions, Community activities, a Student Programme and more.

The Opening Session itself will provide a compact hour including a preview of the week’s events, interviews with EAGE Board members, recognition of award winners, and a new feature, the Crosstalk Debate. This will be a panel discussion with leading figures in the oil and gas industry moderated by Andrew McBarnet, author of the Crosstalk column in First Break. The theme will be ‘Where do we go from here?’ and the panel will answer questions sent in from members around the world. This is a chance to get the view from the top as the industry faces the challenge of the Covid-19 pandemic, the collapse of the oil price, energy transition and climate change mitigation.

The Technical Programme which will run through the week allows delegates an opportunity to participate in the parallel sessions on offer. With 65 sessions to explore and around 450 presentations, there is surely something for everyone.

The presentations will be pre-recorded and made available for view to registered delegates a minimum of a week FIRST

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prior to the start of the event. That means 150 hours of high quality content to dive into. The pre-recordings will be available for three days after the conference ends.

Supporting the event will be a unique exhibition where companies can showcase their latest technological developments, products, and services via an interactive set-up. Oil and service companies, equipment suppliers, research institutes and governmental agencies are just a few of the many who will be represented. Interactivity will be of paramount importance. Event participants can join the exhibitors’ live presentations, read about their offerings, interact with them via audio and video, or arrange individual virtual meetings.

Inside the ‘Community Hub’, EAGE will offer an engaging set of activities on career development open to all delegates. For students, there will be recruitment advice and networking with university and company representatives.

If you haven’t already done so, it’s time to head over to www.EAGEONLINE2020.org. There you can find out more and, most important, register in time for the Annual Conference & Exhibition Online!

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EAGE NEWS

Make this year’s NSG online your time to get together with near surface geophysicists around the world It’s been quite a journey for the Near Surface Geoscience 2020 Conference & Exhibition but we have finally got there.

On 7-8 December you will be able to join the special online version. Potentially this means a bigger participation than ever before, as you can register and attend from your home location with no need to travel.

Because of worries over the Covid-19 pandemic, we had to keep refashioning NSG 2020 to get where we are today.

First we announced the relocation of the event from our original venue in Belgrade in September to a joint meeting with the EAGE Conference & Exhibition, which was expected to be a hybrid combination of in-person attendance and online participation.

Now we are set on a fully online event with much to look forward to in this new format. For that we must first acknowledge our near surface community for their continued understanding and encouragement as we have continued our efforts to develop a successful meeting.

We are confident that the programme that we have devised will meet all the

quality criteria traditionally expected of this longstanding event in the industry calendar. We have over 30 sessions that offer a diverse range of topics related to Applied Shallow Marine Geophysics, Geophysics for Mineral Exploration and Mining, innovative technical and hardware solutions for Environmental and Engineering Geophysics, and more! All technical presentations will be pre-recorded and offered to registered delegates in the week before the event, as well as three days after the event ends.

We are also very pleased to be cooperating with the South African Geophysical Association (SAGA) and the Canadian Geophysical Exploration Society (KEGS) to bring selected papers from their respective meetings that can be presented during the conference. Delegates can explore the Best of KEGS session on Monday 7 December and our SAGA presentations are hosted on Tuesday 8 December. These collaborations, together with our longstanding partnership with EEGS and the SAGEEP meetings, foster worldwide sharing of scientific excellence.

Along with the conference proceeding we are of course hosting the Online Exhibition. This is a somewhat new online concept. Our plan is to connect companies in the near-surface field and enable them to showcase their newest activities, products and services and our delegates.

As an event participant you will be able to interact with our exhibitors and get the latest reports on how the industry has advanced and adapted in recent times.

Don’t forget the Opening Session, where we will kick off the event by exploring the future of the Near Surface Division and the continued sustainability of the wider near surface-related field.

Finally, remember that networking is an important element of every NSG occasion, which is why this year will be no exception. You will be able to connect and meet with peers in the field from all over the world. If you join our conference and exhibition you are sure to develop valuable connections and get insightful knowledge on the subjects that matter to you. Don’t wait any longer and make sure you register now at www.NSG2020.org.

Make the most of our online exhibitions Even in this challenging time, it remains a must for companies and universities to increase their exposure to those interested in their products and services. Our NSG 2020 and EAGE 2020 meetings are shaping up to be solid alternatives to our traditional conferences. Both meetings are featuring an online exhibition to complement the conference programme. The online exhibition will harness the power of virtual networking with professionals around the globe, allow companies and universities to promote their brand, showcase their products and services, and seek out new talent and ideas.

The interactive digital platforms for NSG 2020 and EAGE 2020 allow easy

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navigation between the technical sessions, community hub and exhibition floor. With only a couple of clicks, delegates will be able to switch from presentations to interactive live sessions with companies and universities. Exhibitors can also invite attendees to join their product demonstrations and technical talks with video and audio or via the chat.

Representative from the EAGE exhibition team says ‘An EAGE Annual wouldn’t be the event it is without its Exhibition area. We are therefore extremely happy with the very interactive platform that enables delegates and exhibitors to really interact and discuss via live video conversations. We encourage all of

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the visitors of the event to also visit the exhibition area and speak to the companies that provide the unique services and products which our industry has to offer.’

Albeit online this year, the exhibitions will still feature some of the leading names in the industry. If you would like to see which exhibitors are attending this year, check out www.NSG2020.org and www.EAGEONLINE2020.org.

We aim to provide something of value that meets the expectations of everyone attending NSG 2020 and EAGE Annual 2020. We are making it so easy for you to find out about the geoscience products and services worldwide and what today’s academia has to offer.

UP-GOING WAVEFIELD

DOWN-GOING WAVEFIELD

UP/DOWN DECONVOLUTION

DOWN/DOWN DECONVOLUTION

WHICH OBN PROCESSOR DELIVERS UP/DOWN AND DOWN/DOWN DECONVOLUTION?

When processing information-rich OBN data sets up/down deconvolution enables us, in a single step, to apply 3D source and receiver deghosting, source designature, and surface-related multiple attenuation to the up-going wavefield.

But wait, there’s more! We also offer an exclusive down/down deconvolution solution which provides all these benefits to the down-going wavefield. These algorithms can significantly improve results and reduce turnaround time.

When you think OBN processing. Think DUG. (Data courtesy of AGS and TGS)

EAGE NEWS

Students look to Annual to share experiences of a tumultuous year The year 2020 didn’t turn out the way students expected. They have had to adapt to a whole different way of working confined by social distancing and lockdown and dependent on online courses for much of their learning.

This is why the EAGE 2020 Annual Conference & Exhibition Online (8-11 December) should be a welcome occasion for students to meet and share the ways they have been able to cope with the disruption to their studies and activities caused by the global Covid-19 pandemic. It will all be part and parcel of the great programme we have been lining up for our student community.

After all, with so much uncertainty, bringing university representatives into the conversation is important.

The conference will also include a new delivery of our e-Summit on 10 December, to which all participants to the Annual Conference will be welcome to join. Together with our panellists, we will look at personal experiences on how 2020 has shaped approaches to learning and how this year has affected career outlook. Unable to join our e-Summit? A recording of this will also be made available via the EAGE YouTube Channel.

Finally, students may also benefit

Online experience ahead for students.

With many students expected to present their research during the meeting as part of the Technical Programme, we decided an interactive student programme is needed to complement these presentations. The result is a combination of familiar activities (albeit with a twist), combined with some innovative ways to get the most out of the conference during the meeting.

For starters, no student programme is complete without a Geo-Quiz. For the very first time, student delegates will have the opportunity to participate in a live online version of the contest. We will also be bringing a new approach to our recruitment cafe - focusing on universities and international academic programmes. For many, December is the time to apply for the next degree.

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from the other career development sessions scheduled at the EAGE Virtual Hub such as our online speed networking and LinkedIn training session with Mark White. Make sure to read the feature on White on page 8 to learn more about the importance of online visibility in career development.

The programme on offer is EAGE’s capstone of a year of virtual and mixed learning opportunities for students. You can expect a continuous focus on our student activities in 2021 - online and, when possible, in person. Make sure to be on the look-out for our upcoming Laurie Dake Challenge announcements, new student lecture tour deliveries and Geo-Quiz opportunities. Before you do, however, make sure to take part in our activities this month.

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Sign up for the 2021 Laurie Dake Challenge student team challenge Calling all students! The prestigious Laurie Dake Challenge is back for its 10th edition. The famed student team challenge, started in 2011, requires a multi-disciplinary group of students to work towards a fully integrated field development plan. This year we will be teaming up with Wintershall DEA, which will provide the dataset for the 2021 challenge.

As in previous editions, we will be looking for a diverse set of teams to participate - both in relation to academic level as well as scientific focus. Teams can only have one PhD student per group in addition to MSc and BSc students.

Each team comprises a maximum of five members, so make sure to get a broad range of topics covered.

This year, we’re asking teams to submit a motivation letter on how they will set themselves up for success. Do you have a great multi-disciplinary team, possess great project management skills, or are you able to communicate your results like a champ? We want to find out in your team’s motivation letter! The best teams will receive the full dataset to impress the jury with their proposal for the field development.

Since the inception of the competition we’ve had teams from around the globe come in first place. Most recently, we welcomed our first ever Mexican winners, with the team from the Instituto Mexicano del Petróleo securing the first place in the 2020 finals. Earlier editions were won by IFP School, the University of Calgary, Dalhousie University and Heriot Watt University - UAE Campus.

If you have what it takes to join this illustrious Hall of Fame, get your team signed up now! You can do so via the student page of the EAGE Website.

EAGE NEWS

Complimentary LinkedIn training on offer at the EAGE 2020 online We have a special offer for anyone who wants to improve their professional social media presence in these days of so much work online. If you have a full registration for the EAGE 2020 Annual Conference & Exhibition, or a day-pass for Wednesday 9 December, you can join Interactive Training Personal Branding on LinkedIn, a complimentary special online training session by Mark White.

After a 10-year career in international sales and marketing within the hi-tech industry and an MBA, White is now dedicated to helping organizations and individuals use online tools to develop their business and market themselves more effectively for their goals. In the last 11 years, he has focused exclusively on training around LinkedIn and delivered a tailored session for our Local Chapters previously at the 81st EAGE Annual Conference, last year in London.

Building and maintaining an active online network have always been a challenge. Good communications are really key to keeping members connected, especially in times of social distancing.

White’s training session in 2019 produced unforeseen benefits. EAGE Local Chapters (most of which are active on LinkedIn) expanded their online activity and in the process grew their community and brought the Association as a whole a little closer to members spread across the world.

Nawal De Freslon (president of Local Chapter Paris) said ‘I think that this session is the opportunity to realize that Linkedin may offer many possibilities that we need

to explore. We tried different tools to reach more people in addition to the posts.

I feel that since last year, the number of people following us has increased a lot, maybe linked to the actual situation and the possibility to join virtual events from worldwide. Thanks to virtual events, we were able to reach people beyond our local community, which is very nice. Personally, I could find friends from school working in other continents. Participants were happy to join and feel that things are moving on. It is important to keep doing this and motivating the team’.

White will be joining us once again for a new training session, this time dedicated to individuals. Here’s what you can expect from his session and why you should participate.

to the 722 million members it has today.

The teaching built on his international sales and marketing background and he loved the variety of sessions he ran. Every session has been different because the companies and people he has trained are all different.

Making personal branding a priority With more people active online than ever before, LinkedIn has still managed to retain its position as the key online environment for business networking and personal branding. Making sure that you give the right impression and deliver the right message is important – we all take care to make sure what we wear and how we speak to people is appropriate in real life. We need to do so online as well, perhaps with even more care because of the reach and the visibility.

What participants can look forward to Hopefully enthusiasm coupled with knowledge helps, understanding what people are going to be interested in and focusing on those areas. Where possible real life examples are used and if White can get people to interact – in breakout sessions or using polls – then that’s a great way to make sure people remain engaged.

We hope that those who are less experienced on LinkedIn will get an understanding and a framework they can use to improve their own professional and personal branding on the site. For the more seasoned participants, White can still introduce some new elements that can build on as well as fine tune some which users are already employing.

Trainer experience White turned to running training on LinkedIn in 2009 when LinkedIn was still relatively small, at least compared

Philosophy White believes that people should be engaged and entertained – at least, that’s the aim. He also feels that you need to show how things happen in action, not in isolation. That is why he always tries to spend as much time doing things live on LinkedIn to show what it can do and what the processes are. The slides that accompany it are really there as memory joggers not the core deliverable.

EAGE Education Calendar 4-5 JAN

VALUE OF INFORMATION IN THE EARTH SCIENCES, BY JO EIDSVIK

ONLINE

2-5 FEB

INTEGRATED METHODS FOR DEEP-WATER RESERVOIR CHARACTERIZATION, BY JON R. ROTZIEN

ONLINE

3-4 FEB

SEISMIC ACQUISITION PROJECT ESSENTIALS: FROM CONCEPT TO COMPLETION AND BEYOND,

BY JAN DE BRUIN

ONLINE

PLEASE ALSO CHECK THE CALENDAR OF WEBINARS ON THE LEARNING GEOSCIENCE WEBSITE. FOR MORE INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION PLEASE VISIT WWW.EAGE.ORG AND WWW.LEARNINGGEOSCIENCE.ORG.

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EAGE NEWS

Meet the winners of the Best Local Chapters 2020 prize

LC Tomsk-Krasnoyarsk-Novosibirsk (left) and LC Madrid (right).

2020 has been an unusual year in so many ways, but it has not stopped our EAGE Local Chapters (LCs) from maintaining their energy and enthusiasm.

Many of them converted their meetings to online formats, found new ways to collaborate with old and new partners, and even expanded their communities.

To honour their activities the EAGE Committee for Membership and Cooperation has reviewed the annual reports submitted by all our LCs worldwide to select the winners of the 2020 Best Local Chapter Prizes. In the end the top awards went to LC Madrid and LC Tomsk-Krasnoyarsk-Novosibirsk (TKN).

We invited the representatives of the two winnning groups, Jorge Navarro and Juan Pablo Corella coordinators of LC Madrid) and Aleksandra Volkova (president) from LC Tomsk-KrasnoyarskNovosibirsk to share their insights on the value of LCs and their future plans.

What does it mean for your LC to receive this recognition?

LC Madrid: We are deeply honoured to receive the prize for Best Local Chapter 2020. It increases even more our enthusiasm to promote EAGE in Spain and constitutes a strong motivation to continue organizing events to foster geoscience in our region. It also gives us the opportunity to show our activities to the international EAGE community in joint collaboration with the Association of Spanish Petroleum Geologists and Geophysicists (AGGEP), which this year celebrates its 40th Anniversary (1980-2020).

LC TKN: It means that we have made a start in the right direction, and we need to develop it further.

Firstly, we would like to gather the best Russian industry experts in our evening lectures (online formats give us more opportunities). One of our key ideas is to engage lecturers in a mobility programme across the cities of Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk.

This will also help us to better assess the interests of members at the three locations. Secondly, our win means that we can invite the world leading experts on our chapter online lectures.

Can you summarize the story of your LC so far and your goals for 2021?

LC Madrid: We were officially set up in March 2017 to provide a regional network of industry and academic professionals within the Spanish EAGE community. Since then, we have encouraged students and junior and senior geoscientists and engineers to become EAGE members. During the last three years we have organized several field trips, workshops, plenary lectures and social events in joint collaboration with AGGEP, gathering geoscience professionals in Spain, both from industry and academia. For the near future, despite

City of Madrid.

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the current Covid-19 pandemic, we are committed to continuing our activities by providing virtual forums for our members to have access to ongoing technical issues. We also look forward to being involved in the 83rd EAGE Annual Conference & Exhibition when it will be held in Madrid in June 2022. We will give our best to be exceptional hosts for the EAGE community members visiting us!

LC TKN: It all started with a group of active members in our community who wanted to explore new opportunities in geoscience, especially international practices. All the steps in the development of the chapter were aimed towards this goal. Next year we are planning more standard events (especially evening lectures) and we would like to try new formats too (with a particular focus on students).

What is the most rewarding thing about being part of a LC? LC Madrid: The most rewarding experience is the opportunity to connect and share experiences with other professionals from our region. On top of that, leading the LC allow us to actively co-organize events that contribute to disseminating research advances in our fields, fostering networking activities between industry and academia, or just having fun with our colleagues during social events such as the LC and AGGEP annual dinner or the geological field trips that we organize every year.

LC TKN: We found enthusiastic people with great experience in the industry who are ready to share their experience with us. We would like to say thanks to the EAGE Moscow office for the great support and for opening up opportunities such as the first EAGE Conference on Data Science in Russia & CIS. We hope that next year we can participate in one or two really big events at a national level.

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EAGE NEWS

What Artificial Intelligence can do for geoscience (Part 2) In the second of our two-part article, members of the co-ordinating committee for the recently formed EAGE Artificial Intelligence (AI) Special Interest Group share their views on the nature of AI, how it attracted their interest and the potential applications/value in geoscience.

Part 1 was published in the November issue of First Break.

Taking part in the discussion: Claire Emma Birnie (Equinor, Senior Data Scientist); Tianci Cui (Enverus, Predictive Analytics Associate); Olivier Dubrule (Imperial College, Visiting Professor); Steve Freeman (Schlumberger, Director, AI and ML); Lukas Mosser (Earth Science Analytics, Geo/Data Scientist); Paul Zwartjes (Aramco, Senior Research Geophysicist); and Jan van de Mortel (Independent).

How do we prepare the next generation of geoscientists entering our industry?

Birnie: Being able to easily access and combine multiple data types in innovative ways to gain insights into a problem is becoming more and more important as resources are becoming scarcer and scarcer. However, this is not always possible when using commercial softwares. Coding is therefore becoming a heavier presence in the geoscientist’s workspace. Preparing students to believe that the limit to their task is their imagination and not what a software can do is the future.

Mosser: A solid foundation in STEM subjects and geophysics, in addition to programming and statistics, can build a solid foundation for geoscientists to adapt to new technologies. Analogue experiences such as field work should still play a central role and be preferred over virtual worlds.

Dubrule: The main priority remains to train future geoscientists on the fundamentals of geosciences. However, too often, young geoscientists do not have a sufficient quantitative background and, as a result, tend to lack a critical eye on techniques such as AI or data science. To me, the key is to teach them these techniques in a simple enough way so that geoscientists 10

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acquire this critical eye. This means they should also have a basic understanding of probability and statistics.

Cui: Offering some AI related courses at school would be good, also organizations like the EAGE should promote related newsletters, talks, interviews, networking events and so on, giving the next generation of geoscientists more exposure to AI. Van de Mortel: Besides the current specializations, make them more conversant/ proficient in the other domain knowledge, at an earlier stage than done before. If done right, ML can actually help here.

Freeman: We need to ensure we provide the materials, the time and the support for people to upskill in data science. We need to ensure the universities are providing data science training and critical thinking around data and data science.

What’s the easiest way to get started with AI? Birnie: It is different from person to person. As I’m a kinesthetic learner (learn by doing), what worked for me was to learn by undertaking short projects that focus on acquiring or improving one or two skills at a time.

Mosser: The Web is full of great learning material that caters to every learning

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style. Visual tutorials on YouTube, written guides in blog posts, and MOOCs on various platforms, and many more. For me, working on a small project that could benefit from ML, and then learning on the job, has been a very rewarding experience.

It also helps to come back later, once you’ve gained more experience, to see what you might have done differently. The SEG Facies contest is one such fantastic resource and served as my project to get into ML back in the day.

Dubrule: Arxiv is for me the best source of up-to-date information. The topic is changing so fast that I do not want to wait one or two years until papers are peer-reviewed and published.

Cui: From my personal experience, it would be very easy if you work closely with people with experience in AI. My current team at Enverus consists of PhD graduates in diverse fields. Almost everyone has worked with AI. before. I learned a lot from them by witnessing their projects, using their code and asking them questions.

That saved me a lot of time googling.

Van de Mortel: There are some very good introductory courses. In case a basic proficiency is needed, Andy Ng’s course on ML (Coursera) is a good start. For an initial skillset for basic development,

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Python and the most common libraries (i.e., TensorFlow /Keras) are best.

Zwartjes: I found the easiest way was to follow an online course. There are plenty and they are changing all the time. I would also advise paying to obtain a certificate so you can demonstrate you have made the effort. Then, you need to practice. If you are lucky, you can get some hands-on skills on the job. Otherwise, you need to invest time in doing an online challenge, such as Kaggle project.

Freeman: Search on the Internet, watch online videos, try online resources, then when you feel comfortable get one of the great free open source technologies like R and Python.

Is AI just for data scientists?

Birnie: Not at all. Whilst data scientist is a relatively new title, their tasks have been undertaken by scientists for decades.

Quantitative analysis of one or more datasets and using this knowledge to aid some form of interpretation or develop predictions is in every geoscientist’s daily life.

New AI tools will be useful to complement classical statistics that have been used for decades in our domain.

Mosser: No, AI and more specifically machine learning are really for everyone, as it already impacts everyone’s lives regardless of occupation.

Dubrule: Like everything else, the knowledge each discipline should have of AI is not the same. Geoscientists must know what neural networks are, what are their strengths and what are their limitations, in order to lay a critical eye on their results.

Cui: Of course not. For instance, in my company, our predictive analytics team delivers research results to financial analysts, who do not have advanced statistics or programming skills. In some projects, we wrap up some AI algorithms as Jupiter notebooks or Python Dashboard with detailed instructions and share with the analysts. Largely by running the code as a black box, our financial analysts can analyze their newest data by themselves and expedite the production pipeline within the company.

Van de Mortel: No. AI can be applied to many other fields and business problems, including general support, i.e., client databases, large/enterprise level administration, etc. Plenty of examples exist in non-tech-

nical fields, such as legal/criminal and individualized client services. An example would be the recommendation systems inside Netflix based on a viewer’s selection of movies, TV series, etc.

Zwartjes: Parts of AI are definitely easy for geoscientists to pick up, like modelling and training networks. Perhaps AI in the proof-of-concept phase is actually best left to the geoscientists since they have the domain knowledge.

Freeman: Absolutely not. AI is for everyone. We need to ensure AI is accessible for all and for ever more people to get engaged in this field. The technology is likely to get simpler and more prolific over time, so we need to ensure people understand how best to utilize these technologies in the most appropriate way.

What is your favourite AI publication?

Dubrule: Andrew Ng’s lectures on YouTube are fantastic. My two favorite books are Deep Learning (2016), by Goodfellow et al., MIT Press, and Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (2006), by Bishop, Springer. On the topic of Gaussian Processes, the book by Rasmussen and Williams is great.

Van de Mortel: One example that sticks out for me is ‘Deep Learning’ (2016), by Goodfellow et al.

Zwartjes: I often use the algorithm published in U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation (2015) Ronneberger et al., Springer International Publishing. It has been influential on image segmentation problems, of which we have a lot in seismic processing and interpretation.

What unique challenges do you see for ML techniques in the geoscience domain?

Birnie: The success of ML techniques depends on the data being fed in as input.

In geoscience, this poses challenges as often our data is scarce, uncertain, and heavily contaminated by noise. However, given we generally have a physical understanding of the problem at hand, our training datasets can be augmented with synthetic modelling. This has already shown promising results in different applications and represented a key difference between our domain and others.

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Mosser: In many cases, we have to deal with small datasets that naturally come with noisy label sets. This poses a challenge since many of the approaches to evaluate ML-based methods do not translate well to our scientific domain. I believe there is only so far we can get in our industry with ML by copying from other domains, and we have to transition to fundamental research tailored to our scientific domain to make any significant impact on our industry.

Dubrule: The availability of large datasets is the key challenge, as we need large training sets for very specific geoscience applications, such as reservoir characterization or seismic interpretation.

Cui: Many conventional techniques in geoscience are based on physics while most machine learning algorithms work as a black box. I think applying interpretable/ explainable AI to the geoscience domain is important but very challenging.

Van de Mortel: The one that sticks out for me is interpretable AI. Many of the successful results are based on using deep learning which is largely a black box type approach. Developing ML that is partly if not fully interpretable (meaning the process between data and results can be observed and interpreted clearly) is still in its infancy at best. Furthermore, to use ML not just to provide statistically relevant predictions, but to help understand and/or develop new understanding of physical or empirical laws. The latter is already being done in certain fields, i.e., biochemistry and molecular science.

Zwartjes: Getting the skills is under your control, having the ideas is under your control, but getting the right kind of data to do anything useful is very difficult. I think there are a lot of people out there with good ideas, but they are stuck because they do not have suitable data to work with.

Which areas of ML do you find most fascinating?

Birnie: Natural language processing (NLP). Being a numbers person, text is something I rarely considered beyond something I read for educational purposes. NLP in particular word embeddings converts words into vectors which capture the word semantics and aid a number of document classification and information retrieval tasks. It is fascinating how accuI

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rately these vectors capture the context surrounding a word.

Dubrule: Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are fascinating in their ability to create new images or 3D representations.

Their capability to ‘invent’ new images based on a large training set of existing ones is truly fascinating. Their potential for inversion can truly revolutionize the discipline of stochastic inversion.

Cui: I am excited to discover a lot of similarity between machine learning and the inverse problems in geophysics, e.g., the forward and backward propagation process when building a neural network as well as calculating the gradient in full-waveform inversion.

Van de Mortel: Set of relationships, but also helps in building a better, deeper (or even entirely new) understanding. This part is still in the relatively early stage and therefore most interesting.

Zwartjes: I find the neural networks that generate data fascinating, like variational auto-encoders and GAN. I am highly skeptical of applying them, but they are fascinating.

Where do you see ML in the geosciences right now - at the peak of inflated expectations, trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment or the plateau of productivity?

Birnie: In my opinion we are just passed the peak and heading towards the trough. In the last years, novel ML-based 12

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approaches have been proposed to solve a variety of tasks in the geoscience sphere.

We are now at a stage where people have started asking ‘do these methods outperform state-of-art algorithms?’

Dubrule: We may be today between the trough of disillusionment and the slope of enlightenment!

Van de Mortel: This depends a bit on which part of AI, and which application.

But roughly at the peak. In my view the trough will be quite limited in depth and duration at best. This is because ML has already been shown to be quite effective in many cases, and any ‘disillusion’ will be more related to ironing out teething problems rather than a significant disappointment based on inflated expectations.

Zwartjes: Judging from the volume of papers showing what wonderful things can be done without addressing the weakness and failure cases, I think we are nearing the peak of inflated expectations. I think authors can be a bit more critical rather than declare victory simply because they trained a network or made a model fit some data.

Freeman: It depends. Different parts are in different places. There was certainly a lot of hype a couple of years ago, we have seen many cool ideas stay on the ‘cool ideas’ shelf. Thankfully we are now starting to see real solutions come along that can scale and make a meaningful difference.

In general I believe we are on the slope to enlightenment and over the next couple of years we should have a real uptick in productivity.

What will the impact of ML be on our industry?

Birnie: I believe ML will automate some simple, yet time intensive tasks. This will allow our geoscientists to focus their energy on more complex tasks in a time when finding and producing resources is becoming harder.

Dubrule: It is very similar to the medical world application in that it will do the easy or routine work that the professional interpreter will then be able to use. This will allow the geoscientist to focus on the high-value instead of the repetitive stuff.

Cui: If developed in the correct direction, it will replace human labour by performing routine tasks better and quicker.

Hopefully, AI can also help us discover

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more scientific patterns which are difficult to be analyzed by traditional methods.

Van de Mortel: Improved efficiency, improvements in ‘perfecting’ the workflows, i.e., processing parameters, more precision and customization/space dependency all data dependent. Development on new workflows, deeper understanding.

Data access: much more re. volume, speed, previously ‘unrelated’ disciplines. More improvement in business decisions.

Zwartjes: I think it will help results to be produced faster. Not necessarily better, but mostly faster. For most problems we know the solution, but just lack the data to get it. So AI is not going to help there.

For other problems where we have the data, AI will help us get the solution faster. I am thinking here mainly of inference problems. For things like predictive maintenance and equipment monitoring I believe AI will truly be transformational as there really was no good alternative before machine learning came along.

Freeman: Our industry needs to be able to do things faster and with greater awareness. AI/ML will enable that speed.

It should ensure that we can quality assure interpretations and decisions. It should allow us to pass mundane repetitive work to the machine and allow people to do the more cognitively challenging and interesting work.

What is your vision of geoscience work in 2050? Will ML and AI play a central role? If yes, how?

Birnie: ML methodologies will be another tool in the toolbox, which I expect to be heavily utilized for certain tasks such as noise suppression or processing, but less so in other areas where a solid physical understanding of the problem is available and should be honoured.

Dubrule: AI will play a central role but I do not believe that it will replace the geoscientist.

Van de Mortel: This is hard to predict as the end result of many effective, shorter term improvements and yet unknown outcomes that impact the way forward are largely unknowable. But overall people will have at least in part very different skillsets, some of them not yet known.

Many of the technologies now in development will have been put together, in

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systems that access massive data lakes (Petabyte level and beyond), and massively interconnected (physical as well as SW wise). Geoscience applications for geothermal, civil engineering (much more than now), environmental (including cleanup). underground storage, etc. Furthermore, the other planets, moons, asteroids, etc. in our solar system mostly through (much further developed) remote satellite based systems (and some ground acquisition). Acquisition systems themselves much further advanced than right now.

Freeman: Geoscientists will be supporting the low carbon and circular economy. We will need to integrate and drive insights into complex systems and all of that will be enabled by AI, often under the hood. Every scientific discipline will leverage AI, Geoscience will be no different.

As with any scientific tool, users need to understand its strengths and weaknesses.

Has AI produced clear value in your area?

Dubrule: Yes, in spite of the hype, we see very interesting applications in seismic interpretation with convolutional neural networks or with generative networks for stochastic reservoir modelling or multi-disciplinary inversion at all scales.

Van de Mortel: Definitely. I’ve seen very encouraging improvements in multi-domain data-based interpretation and analysis, data processing, survey design, etc.

Zwartjes: For seismic processing think it is too early to answer question like this.

There are some nice examples but these do not necessarily create value. I would like to see processing projects executed 50% faster due to a significant AI component.

Then you have demonstrated value.

Freeman: Absolutely. I have been able to process and interpret data at speeds and scales not previously achievable.

What are the biggest challenges for delivering AI solutions at scale?

Birnie: Once a solution is deployed at scale, not only AI experts will use it. A critical mass of geoscientists with domain knowledge can instead be expected to benefit from it to tackle their daily tasks.

The biggest challenge I currently see in the wide adoption of AI is the lack of QC tools

that can aid users in the interpretation of the results.

Van de Mortel: These are basically physical. Already the size and energy consumption of large systems is becoming more and more an issue which will grow exponentially. The challenge is already there and growing: should we keep all the raw data, and how do we access/work with them in an energy efficient manner? Recent developments (research stage) in photon and quantum based computers may hold at least part of the key to resolving this.

Zwartjes: Integration with existing software and availability of data across geoscience silos Freeman: It’s quite a different world to create a successful scaled AI solution versus an AI POC. When you scale you have to consider many other aspects that are more in the realm of software engineering, architecture and pipeline construction.

How you deploy and manage and update is quite a different set of challenges to how you make an AI proof point. It needs different skills, processes and technology.

generalize because it does not learn the underlying physics of our problems. A hybrid, physics-constraint approach is the way to go there.

Freeman: Often I think this is more how it has been applied and to what questions rather than what it can actually do. AI has and can perform very well when you ask a very specific question with a specific outcome. Where it will often and has often failed is when people try to apply it to very broad integrated problems.

Where has AI performed well and where not?

Birnie: AI performs very well where there is a definitive answer, e.g., this image contains a dog. AI struggles when subjectivity comes into the picture. If we as humans cannot, for example, have a general consensus between ourselves on the interpretation of a seismic horizon or fault, then the model is also going to struggle.

Van de Mortel: Overall, especially deep learning has demonstrated to be ‘unreasonably’ effective in finding multi-domain relationships otherwise not discovered.

Also, much better (data-driven) work for fault/fracture detection, etc. being more consistent than when done by hand. The caveat is that, especially when data quality is relatively poor, the results may include artefacts that are sometimes very hard to discover. This is where the development of interpretable AI can provide a lot of value, a complex and comprehensive task to do but in my view worth it.

Zwartjes: I think AI will do very well in problems that are related to machine vision and simple image-to-image processing. In classical inversion problems I think it will produce fantastic results on training data. However, it will struggle to

What are the big areas where AI could do more?

Birnie: Machine learning has been shown to have great strengths in image processing and in other related domains. I believe that these methodologies for signal enhancement and detection have great potential for seismic processing purposes.

Van de Mortel: As already stated – interpretable AI. Zwartjes: In the field of seismic data processing most of the time is spent on parameterization and QC. I think AI can provide big wins there, but most researchers are not working on it. I think the reason is that AI research is mostly done in universities which do not have access to a full suite of seismic data processing software or datasets. So that development will come from the few companies that have both, and therefore progress will go very slowly compared to other fields.

Freeman: One of the biggest challenges in our industry is wrangling data. AI is incredibly powerful for this but this area has not really had the attention it deserves.

Simplifying and enriching basic data like logs and core measurements is a place where I expect us to see great steps forward in the coming years.

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Virgil Bardan 1939-2020

Virgil Bardan was known for his contributions to seismic data acquisition and digital data processing related to inversion, sampling, and multiple attenuation.

His numerous publications and erudite presentations, in a career that extended for more than 45 years, established him as a leader in exploration geophysics.

Bardan lived his entire life in Romania, a country with a long history of petroleum exploration and production. In 1861 the first successful oil well in Romania was drilled to a depth of 150 m, using wooden rods and auger type bits. Before the Second World War, Romania was the unchallenged leader in European petroleum production and has continually served as a testing ground for many geophysical methods. In this fruitful environment Virgil’s passion for the mathematical aspect of geophysics and seismic data processing was anchored.

Bardan received a master’s degree in electronic engineering (1961) at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest (PUB). He was a second lieutenant in the Romanian military, 1961-1962. He

received a master’s degree in mathematics (1970) at the University of Bucharest (UB). Subsequently, he obtained a PhD in applied mathematics (1978) from UB and a PhD in data processing (1992) from PUB. He worked for more than four decades (1961–2004) for Prospectiuni in Bucharest, the leading national geophysics company, in acquisition/processing of geophysical data, research and field work, and oil and gas exploration.

Between 1970 and 1983 and 1992 and 1993 Bardan was an associate professor at PUB, and an associate professor at the Department of Geophysics, University of Bucharest from 1991 to 2006. During the same period, he was also part-time professor at PUB and a consultant for Western Geophysical. From 2004 he was a part-time research geophysicist at the Sabba S. Stefanescu Institute of Geodynamics of the Romanian Academy. He never retired from working in geophysics.

His last paper was published only two years ago in 2018.

Bardan was a member of the EAGE, the SEG and the Romanian Society of Geophysics. He is the only Romanian to have received an honorary membership from EAGE and the second Romanian after Sabba Stefanescu to become an honorary member of SEG. Bardan was a theoretician as well as practitioner, a rare combination of scientific talent and professional skill.

He published more than 100 papers in geophysical periodicals and presented numerous papers at international confer-

ences. His papers appeared in Geophysics, Geophysical Prospecting, First Break, International Journal of Modern Physics, International Journal of Imaging Systems and Technology, and various Romanian journals. His contributions to the development of geophysical inversion theory, highly appreciated internationally, have important applications in many areas, including dynamic predictive deconvolution, vibroseis deconvolution, migration, and dip moveout. His work on sampling and interpolation helped significantly in building the foundations of modern seismic data acquisition and processing.

Among his publications are important contributions to trace interpolation for spatially aliased seismic data; de-aliasing of seismic common midpoint gathers and constant offset sections; processing of non-rectangularly-sampled multi-dimensional geophysical data; sampling 2D seismic data to evaluate linear Radon transforms; as well as hexagonal sampling and hexagonal binning in 3D seismic data.

Behind the scientific personality Bardan was a man of extraordinary kindness. A loyal friend, funny and full of jokes, he loved playing tennis and was a talented chess player. He was a devoted husband and father, in later years doting on his two grandchildren.

Bardan was born on 4 November 1939 in Strehaia-Mehedinti, Romania, the son of Ion and Aurelia (Briceag) Bardan.

He is survived by his wife Alina Mihai, daughter Monica and two grandchildren.

EAGE Student Calendar 7-8 DEC

NEAR SURFACE GEOSCIENCE ‘20

ONLINE

8-11 DEC

EAGE 2020 ANNUAL CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION ONLINE (STUDENT ACTIVITIES)

ONLINE

14-17 JUNE 2021

82ND EAGE ANNUAL CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION (STUDENT ACTIVITIES)

AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

FOR MORE INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION PLEASE CHECK THE STUDENT SECTION AT WWW.EAGE.ORG

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Papers invited for the 2021 Annual Meeting: it really is that time already!

The Call for Papers has gone out for the 82nd EAGE Annual Conference and Exhibition, which is due to be held in Amsterdam on 14-17 June 2021 in Amsterdam.

Yes, you read that right. We are planning to get back to a regular in person Annual Meeting next June, hopefully with no pandemic interruption. That means submission of papers for consideration in the Technical Programme are being invited as of now with a deadline of 15 January 2021.

Overall theme of the event is ‘Delivering for the Energy Challenge: Today and Tomorrow’. It will be our annual occasion to attract geoscience and engineering professionals worldwide to participate in a multi-disciplinary gathering where current practice and future technology and business can be discussed in a vibrant environment, connections can be made or renewed and the EAGE community hub

will welcome members to all the latest networking opportunities.

As ever, daily technical sessions will include oral and poster presentations covering research and practice in a wide variety of disciplines including geophysics, geology, reservoir engineering, mining and civil engineering, data science, HSE and sustainability.

The technical committee encourages intending participants to share their work and ideas for further learning and discussion with their peers. Abstracts for consideration should be submitted by 15 January 2021. For more details on the topics and submission process, please refer to www.eageannual2021.org or contact us at abstracts@eage.org.

Putting the EO into gEOlogical applications is message for London London Chapter’s evening talk in October was again delivered online, this time from Norway. Charlotte Bishop of Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT) told us about modern capabilities of earth observation technologies for geological and engineering applications. Her specific focus was on terrain and sea using hyperspectral and multispectral analysis.

Spectral range of the latest multi-sensory instruments on the orbit is much wider than what human eye can perceive – it expands the horizons for deeper insights. Longer wavelet radar measurements do make mapping possible even through the clouds, vegetation and, in some cases, through the first metres of the ground.

On-demand hyperspectral measurements can detect and monitor oil

spills on water or land, green house gas emissions and concentrations, soil subsidence due to mining or construction works. They might be used for lithological mapping, reconnaissance, prospecting, fracture mapping, discovering deposits as well as in the oil and gas upstream and downstream phases.

The range of the applications is ever expanding, so is the market for the remote sensing technologies.

Impressed by the scope, breadth, and resolution of the presented satellite imagery, the audience was very active during the Q&A session asking about trends, tricks and limitations of the satellite-based remote sensing in geoscience. Recording of the talk is available on the EAGE’s YouTube channel.

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The lecture was the sixth webinar organized by EAGE LC London in 2020. In the lockdown world these online meetings have been able to partially substitute for live networking events and even brought a somewhat wider, global, audience into our LC activities. We also attended and co-organized online events with other LCs and Special Interest Groups of EAGE, expanding the network across the usual offline perimeter.

EAGE Local Chapter London acknowledges Artem Kashubin of PetroTrace, Bingmu Xiao of CGG, Lok Lee of Schlumberger, Celina Giersz of Shearwater and, of course, Charlotte Bishop of Kongsberg Satellite Services for facilitating this event.

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Inspiring messages at Dutch women’s meetings Over the past months, the Dutch section of the EAGE Women in Geoscience & Engineering has resumed its activity in collaboration with the GAIA Network to offer career development initiatives for the local community.

The first session was on ‘Networking in the Covid-19 era’ in September, focusing on how to network with intent and purpose despite the Covid-19 challenges. The first part of the event was devoted to an inspiring presentation by Aletta Filippidou, who has a PhD in geophysics and is currently working in the New Business Development department at Shell.

Aletta, besides her technical skills and roles, has longstanding social-impact interests and helped launch various social initiatives, like Wash Separately, a pro-bono consultancy that specialized in boutique tailor-made professional development solutions (career advice, negotiation skills, stakeholder mapping etc), 75inQ, a company advocating enabling energy transition by bringing gender balance to the top, and Dandelion, an NGO that supported refugees in Lesbos refugee camps, to name

but a few. She regularly runs workshops and gives speeches.

In the second part of the event participants were assigned to different digital rooms of 3-4 participants per room where they had the chance to practice their social skills and ask questions. The webinar was a fantastic opportunity for Women in Geoscience & Engineering to get together, get to know each other and develop new approaches on how to execute personal research for the benefit of their career, as well as their social life.

The following month, the WGE-GAIA collaboration produced another interesting webinar titled ‘Closing the gap – gender diversity in academia and industry’ featuring two speakers - Dr Ir Femke Vossepoel and Prof Dr. Marion Matters-Kammerer - who have been in both industry and academia throughout their careers. Vossepoel gave her talk first on ‘Cycling with a headwind’ about the unconscious bias that women face. She complemented her explanation by having participants do a ‘selective attention test’, showing that it is indeed easy to miss out on signals when

our focus is elsewhere. She also explained how women professionals can create a tailwind for themselves by asking for/ arranging a mentor or sponsor, by talking to others about their experiences and by speaking up.

After a short discussion, Matters-Kammerer followed with her talk ‘Work hard and dream big, mama’ about her personal experiences. She talked about the interplay between a professional career and a family life, the role of framing and self-framing and the effect of role models: who qualifies? Why are they important and what to do when you cannot find them? In the discussion, she explained that women do not have to be afraid of being hired just because of their gender and that it is important to check on salaries at a university/company to ensure that you get what you deserve. In addition, you can be a role model for your daughter(s) by showing that it is possible to be a good mom and have a career. To conclude, it was an evening of openness, discussion and inspiration. Thank you to all the speakers who contributed to these successful events.

SAGEEP 2021 and the 1st Munitions Response Meeting go digital SAGEEP 2021 and the 1st Munitions Response Meeting will be a 100% online experience this coming March. Conducting the meetings online is the most appropriate mode to safeguard personal safety while providing expanded opportunities to involve registrants from around the globe.

The meetings will be held in the week of 14 March 2021 as planned, although the timing will vary from the intended in-person meeting to accommodate registrants in a wide number of time-zones.

While an online event is not what we anticipated a year ago, we are excited to exploit the format’s advantages. For example, we have the potential to see presentations without timing conflicts, the

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expanded opportunities for people to attend who wouldn’t typically be able to travel to the physical venue, greater time for interaction and questions with the authors, etc.

The organizing committee is busy working on details and will provide them as soon as possible. We are committed to making regular contact with participants through direct mailing in the weeks to come. In the meantime, here are some big-picture items: A call for additional abstracts is open until 16 December 2020. Note: the acceptance period is shorter than previous years.

This is necessary given the timeframe needed to complete the technical programme preparations.

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All accepted abstracts will remain valid for the 2021 online conference. We will be contacting presenters by email to provide additional information in the coming days.

All persons who registered for 2020 will be pre-registered for the online event.

All existing registrants will receive an email with detailed information on their registration in the coming days as well.

More information is available on the Frequently Asked Questions section of the website and information will be added as it is available. Thanks for your patience as we fine tune the details.

We look forward to seeing you online in March 2021.

EAGE NEWS

EAGE seabed seismic workshop covers all the bases

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The first EAGE three-day workshop on Seabed Seismic Today: from Acquisition to Application originally planned for Abu Dhabi, UAE was held online on 8-10 September 2020 and attracted 120 participants from 16 countries. Claudio Bagaini, Chris Walker, Gary Hampson, Guillaume Cambois, Eivind Fromyr and Timothy Bunting describe the proceedings.

The first session on Acquisition began with Guillaume Cambois, principal geophysicist at ADNOC, providing an expertly given presentation on the largest seabed seismic survey in the world. He explained the company’s motivation for the survey, outlined the extremely complex environment involved and the simultaneous source approach being used to acquire the huge volume of more than 30,000 km2 of data – more in less than three years.

Henrik Roende, chief geophysicist TGS, discussed the ground-breaking multi-client sparse node ocean bottom (OBN) survey they acquired in the Gulf of Mexico in 2019. This was the first exploration scale OBN survey acquired for both enhanced imaging and improved velocity analysis. He showed dramatic improvements in imaging resulting from the enhanced illumination achieved by combining the OBN data with previously acquired towed streamer data and the improved velocity model achieved using long offset full waveform inversion (FWI).

James Wallace, EAME area geophysicist, Polarcus, described a case study offshore Middle East, where multiple source streamer and OBN data were acquired using the same vessel. Penta-source was used for the streamer data whilst triple source was used for the OBN resulting in a single seamless multi-seismic data volume despite the six producing platforms in the survey area.

Tim Bunting, chief geophysicist, Seabed Geosolutions, then gave an overview of the evolution of OBN seismic acquisition, highlighting the operational performance improvements that have resulted from the latest generation of node technology and introduction of simultaneous sources. He also described the latest developments in the Spicerack ‘flying node’ which offers orders of magnitude faster node deploy18

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ment and recovery speeds enabling even higher blending folds to deliver data at unprecedented rates.

The final talk of the day by Didier Lecerf, principal geophysicist, PGS, described how full wavefield migration (FWM) can be used to deliver improved imaging and better FWI velocity models with radically fewer OBN nodes than currently used.

All the day’s presenters then participated in a lively on-line Q&A session.

More than 75 people of the 115 workshop participants stayed online to participate in the 45-minute discussion.

The second day began with the Case Studies session. Francesca Twynam, geosolutions geophysicist, WesternGeco, gave a paper on ‘Improved reservoir monitoring with PP & PS time lapse imaging utilizing up/down deconvolution: Edvard Grieg Field’. Twynam showed how well up/down deconvolution works to deconvolve the down-going P wavefield from the up-going P and the radial PS wavefields. She demonstrated that both PP and PS 4D changes were detectable kinematically and dynamically associated with water injection and production.

Tom Rayment, head of research (processing and imaging), DUG Technology, described the processing and imaging of a multi-petabyte OBN survey in the North Sea. This densely shot survey volume was equivalent to 520,000 km2 of conventional 80-fold streamer 3D. Rayment described automated quality control, very high fold deblending (which included the deblending of high levels of seismic interference), up/ down deconvolution, the first ever production use of down/down deconvolution, full-azimuth FWI and depth imaging.

Subodh Kumar, principal geophysicist, Petronas, described how subsurface complexities have been increasingly unlocked

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using sea-bed seismic applications in the Malaysian basins. He discussed how modelling, including finite difference modelling, had become very important in order to design and plan their surveys to solve the sub-surface problems. Most of the producing fields are in shallow water with significant infrastructure and shallow gas obscuring the target zones. They have explored the use of a wide range of technologies. The examples showed how this concerted effort has paid off with steadily improving quality since the 1990s.

The Processing session began with Gary Hampson (distinguished advisor, DUG Technology) giving a talk on ‘Down/ down deconvolution’. He described a new idea for performing 3D signature deconvolution and free-surface multiple attenuation on the down-going wavefield. It means the subsequent mirror images can enjoy the same kind of powerful deconvolution as up/down deconvolution. He went on to show examples from the North Sea and to demonstrate the connections between down/down deconvolution, up/down deconvolution and surface-related multiple elimination (SRME).

Woodon Jeong, geophysicist, Saudi Aramco, discussed the very important problem of v-z noise on the vertical component of OBN datasets. He described a workflow in which the area of noise on the common receiver gather is identified with a mask and the radial and transverse components are adaptively subtracted from the vertical component. Finally, an amplitude modulation is applied to ensure the vertical component has a similar envelope to the pressure data. Jeong showed examples of the effectiveness on real data.

Dongliang Zhang, senior geophysicist, Saudi Aramco, spoke about the challenges of processing an OBN survey that spanned from 100 m above sea-level to 1000 m

EAGE NEWS

below. It had a seabed inclined by as much as 800 and the geological components had strongly varying contrasts generating interbed multiples. He showed the effectiveness of data-driven surface and inter-bed multiple attenuation, stressing how important it is to ensure the data is well prepared for these processes.

Bahaaeldin Kamel, geophysical team leader, Saudi Aramco, used an orthogonally shot, wide azimuth 4C marine dataset to demonstrate how a diligent processing approach can bring out the value of converted waves. He stressed the importance of a surface consistent approach to maintain good amplitude control. As a result the P/PS inversion produced valuable S and P impedance images which helped determine the sand thicknesses with greater confidence.

Fritz Damainus, geophysical team leader, CGG, discussed the problem of node quality control in surveys with massive numbers of nodes. He showed how unsupervised machine learning can be used to very rapidly identify statistical outliers. The first example used k-means clustering to classify node amplitudes, one class of which successfully captured the anomalous nodes. The second example used k-means clustering to classify first break picks. By inspecting the classes it was possible to reject certain picks based upon the classification.

The final day began with a session on Imaging & Velocity Model Building.

Joakim Blanch, principal at BHP, delivered the keynote address on ‘Strategies to increase cost efficiency of node surveys’. He focused on how cost efficient sparse OBN surveys can improve the velocity model in a deep water setting in the Gulf of Mexico.

Guillaume Cambois followed with a talk on how surface-related multiples help image the overburden in shallow waters offshore Abu Dhabi. He explained

how a new technology, called Separated Wavefield Imaging, can be applied in ultra-shallow waters to improve near-surface illumination and through improved low frequency phase control can improve FWI results as well.

Stephane Operto, research scientist at Laboratoire Géoazur, National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Université Côte d’Azur, presented ‘Robust Full Waveform Inversion for sparse ultra-long offset OBN data’. The technology reconstructs data-assimilated wavefield mimicking the true wavefields, from which the parameters are updated by minimizing the wave equation errors. The technique is suited for and was applied to sparse long offset node data.

Denes Vigh, FWI leader at Schlumberger, took the audience to the full elastic domain with his talk on ‘Elastic full-waveform inversion using all components of 4C data’. Using both the compressional and shear velocity fields, he demonstrated improved depth imaging of a data set in the Gulf of Mexico where shallow gas was present.

In the last session on Novel Applications, Claudio Bagaini, geophysical advisor, Schlumberger, discussed a numerical analysis of when the shift invariant assumption used to simplify the solving of the integral equations inherent in up-down deconvolution (UDD) and down-going demultiple (DGD) can no longer be used due to the increasing complexity of the geological and geophysical conditions in the data. After explaining the mathematical theory behind their multi-dimensional approach, he showed how he and his colleagues had developed a regularized inverse procedure that mitigates the numerical problems usually encountered in this ill-posed inverse problem. Using synthetic data he demonstrated how UDD and DGD

can be extended to a broader range of geological environments.

Hugo Ruiz, vice president of geology and geophysics, Octio Gravitude, presented an alternative to 4D seismic measurements, namely 4D gravity and subsistence monitoring. After reviewing the principles of 4D gravity measurement Ruiz explained the technology and methodology developed to allow hydrocarbon production induced changes in microgravity to be accurately determined. Using five case studies offshore Norway he showed how 4D gravity is integrated into reservoir management at considerably less cost than 4D seismic.

He concluded by showing how the smaller size of the latest generation of gravimeters could reduce costs whilst improving resolution allowing the method to be used in a wider range of fields.

The last talk on the accurate measurement of node depths and seafloor deformation during seismic acquisition complemented Ruiz’s presentation. Audun Lidak, geophysicist at Octio Gravitude showed how Octio’s high precision depth sensors can, with off-field calibrations, measure node depths to an accuracy of a few centimetres. By installing these depth sensors on the node deployment ROV for an OBN survey in the Gulf of Mexico in 2018 node depths were determined to an accuracy of 4 cm in up to 3000 m water depths. Such unparalleled node depth determinations can deliver improved 4D results.

Finally the virtual floor was opened to questions on all the workshop presentations, with the presenters from all the five workshop sessions online. Claudio Bagaini concluded the workshop by thanking all those involved in putting the the workshop together and the audience, which was almost 50% larger than had been expected.

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Hoping for the best may not be an option A recent column in the Financial Times made reference to of the virus won’t make it go away. The early development of a a comment by Irving Fisher (1867-1947), in his heyday one proven vaccine will take time to have an impact, and it is unclear of the world’s most renowned economists. Fisher apparently how quickly such an antidote can be made available. There is of once remarked that ‘the sagacious businessman is constantly course another whole issue: how many in the population will be forecasting’. willing to be immunized?

Assuming a continuing period of intermittent lockdowns Leaders of the oil and gas industry and the service sector have good reason to be frustrated by this apparently sage advice. They and pandemic interruptions in many countries worldwide, comcould ponder whether any year could be less predictable for the monsense suggests that manufacturing, transport and consumer oil and energy business than 2020, and hence question the value spending is going to continue to be muted and unlikely to of forecasting as a valid tool. That sentiment would also apply to significantly drive up the demand for oil. That means an increase the opinion polls ahead of the two most recent US presidential in the price of oil leading to a relaxation of oil company budget elections. In November, they were spectacularly wrong about the restraints is not on the cards. margin of defeat for the incumbent President Donald Trump, and Probably the best that can be said for geoscience-related oil Hilary Clinton was expected to win in 2016. In pollsters’ defence, business in 2021 is that it won’t get any worse. That’s seems to the margins of error may have been more to do with the inherent be the consensus of some leading companies such as CGG, PGS, Polarcus and TGS in recent reporting of their third quarter results. problems of all canvassing, i.e., unrepresentative sampling, untruthful responses, assessment of intention to vote, etc., and Their conclusion is based on the understandable assumption that how to allow for this. oil companies have to keep up at least a Fisher himself came unstuck with his ‘Business life will not get minimum of E&P activity. own predictions. A revered early advoHowever, it seems likely that it will be back to anything like cate of neoclassical economics, he also 2022 before we can expect to see more than made pots of money from selling some of normal until the Covid-19 just maintenance money being dedicated to his practical inventions while professor of exploration. Even then, there is almost nil pandemic abates.’ political economy at Yale, notably an ‘index chance that oil companies will suddenly visible filing system’. Unfortunately, he engage in a spending spree. No need to lost his fortune in investments and his reputation as an economic consult the energy agencies and/or analysts who keep tabs on soothsayer by failing to predict and then acting on the reality of supply/demand to know that in the short term at least the industry the 1929 Great Depression. is taking an extremely cautious view on oil demand.

Looking ahead, 2021 looks daunting for the oil and gas indusConventional wisdom suggests that we are currently awash try and the service sector. It seems obvious that business life will with oil and plenty to spare. The OPEC+ countries which include not get back to anything like normal until the Covid-19 pandemic Russia have been reducing output since January 2017 in an effort abates. When that happens is anyone’s guess. With the onset of to balance the market, support prices and reduce inventories. winter in the Northern Hemisphere, rates of infection have gone They are currently curbing production at 7.7 million barrels per up alarmingly in many countries and continue to be sky high day (bpd), down from 9.7 million bpd, and are in a dilemma over in the United States, a challenge acknowledged by incoming whether to ease restrictions or hold off amid signs of a secondary President Joe Biden. Continuing efforts to contain the spread wave of Covid-19. Whatever they decide, it is clear that there is

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no shortage of OPEC+ oil reserves that can be tapped to serve recovery of the seismic industry is likely to benefit by the recent the market should demand pick up in the short-term. The same further industry capacity reductions’.

Reading between the lines, this seems like an expectation of applies to the North American shale oil industry, which has temporarily lost its lustre. It would not take much of a change in a modest future for the towed-streamer seismic survey market the price of oil for the sector to rediscover its mojo. in which the main players – PGS, Shearwater GeoServices and Polarcus – are engaged. The pre-Covid-19 levels of business The incentive to invest big in new reserves is not seen as an attractive option for oil companies. It is too much of a gamble referred to were still pretty harsh and led to the increasing when the impact and pace of energy transition remains uncertain. global fleet size reductions, also mentioned. The marine seismic market business model has also changed significantly. Available In addition, the optics are not good. The European section of Big exploration expenditure by oil companies is increasingly being Oil is pivoting towards alternative energy and shrinking their channelled through multi-client programmes in which TGS, CGG core oil and gas business, in BP’s case quite spectacularly. To and Schlumberger are now fully engaged. As a consequence, launch ambitious E&P programmes at this juncture could stoke operating companies do not get the big share of the cake they the objections of those stakeholders who are already lobbying for once received from old-style proprietary surveys. more environmentally sensitive business decisions.

Some speculate that the future for this sector lies in seabed The flaw in this thinking is that the end of the oil era may seismic using ocean bottom nodes (OBN). The technology is not be closing nearly as fast as many choose to imagine. This is gradually improving to make it an attractive alternative to towed probably what prompted Dr Sultan Bin Ahmed Al Jaber, Group streamer seismic in an increasing number of geological settings.

CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), The prospective market is mainly made up of to tell the recent Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition Conference (ADIPEC) ‘So far diversification those oil companies focusing on extracting the maximum from existing oil reserves and that oil demand could reach more than 105 has not emerged as limiting exploration investment to near field million bpd within the next decade and that prospects that can be tied to existing producing the petrochemicals sector has room to grow a possibility.’ field installations. There is a move towards through to 2050. sparse node distribution and other techniques that are expanding This prospect would justify the unabashed wager on continthe scope and coverage of OBN, previously thought of as suitable uing global demand for oil that has set ExxonMobil apart from for imaging over very targeted areas, for example for 4D seismic its supermajor peers. The company continues enthusiastically monitoring. This takes the fight into towed-streamer territory. It to pour money into the development of the giant fields in the seems only a matter of time before all marine seismic contractors Stabroek block, offshore Guyana. It is doubtless hoping to get will have a serious seabed seismic offering. That of course could the last laugh on those who see ‘peak oil’ occurring later this put a strain on profitability of the emerging OBN survey market. decade when everyone will be driving electric cars and countries In a way the Covid-19 pandemic may provide the pause such as China will have weaned themselves from coal. Analyst required for marine seismic contractors and equipment suppliers Rystad Energy recently revised its view stating that oil demand to review the options. The contraction in the business, really since could peak in 2028 at 102 million bpd rather than 106 million the end of the last boom in 2013/14, is surely a message that bpd in 2030. there is only room for a few if companies are going to be able to The many head-spinning future energy scenarios are beyond sustain viable enterprises. That may mean some more very tough the control of the service sector of the oil business. However, as decisions ahead. the economist Irving Fisher implied, business cannot go on withSo far diversification has not emerged as a possibility. The out a plan. Judging from their public statements, the bosses of the very specific equipment involved in seismic operations does big geoscience-related businesses are adopting a policy of waiting not readily lend itself to any other activity. People can of course out the crisis. A recent statement by PGS sums up what most of evolve. Interest in geoscience-related activity in the years to the other players are experiencing: ‘PGS believes it will take time come, especially for the next generation, may very well trend for seismic demand to get back to pre-Covid 19 levels. However, away from the oil business and extend towards geothermal combining the effects of potential pent-up demand, a more stable technology, carbon capture and storage, site surveys for wind oil price through second half of 2020 and an expectation of higher power, geohydrology, smart cities, and many other applications. oil prices in 2021, PGS believes in increasing activity levels Another famous economist John Maynard Keynes made through 2021. Despite the impacts of the Covid-19 crisis, energy two very apposite comments that may well apply to the whole consumption is expected to continue to increase in the future with geoscience-related business – ‘The market can stay irrational oil and gas continuing to play an important role in the energy longer than you can stay solvent’ and ‘difficulty lies not so much mix. Offshore reserves will be vital for future supply and support in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones’. the demand for marine seismic services. The expected future

Views expressed in Crosstalk are solely those of the author, who can be contacted at andrew@andrewmcbarnet.com.

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PGS releases data offshore Brazil

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Shearwater wins project offshore Senegal

Seismic companies cautiously report first signs of recovery Seismic acquisition and geoscience companies are confident that the industry will start to recover soon despite posting more losses in their third quarter results as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and low oil prices.

All the big companies in the sector reported substantial losses for the second quarter in a row, with CGG reporting a net loss of $98 million, TGS a net loss of $71 million, PGS a net loss of $32 million, ION Geophysical a net loss of $24 million and Polarcus a net loss of $13 million.

However, results statements released with the figures indicated the first signs of recovery as optimism rose that an effective vaccine for Covid-19 has been tested and widespread vaccination programmes will be implemented early next year.

Polarcus CEO, Duncan Eley, said that the company had won four awards since the end of the second quarter: ‘Our third quarter earnings demonstrated 10% improved revenue driven by day rates on contracts having increased 26%.

‘Tender activity slowly increased during the quarter with demand uncertainty remaining in the near term. We expect exploration and production spending to increase through 2021 with fundamentals supporting a longer-term recovery.’

Rune Olav Pedersen, president and chief executive officer of PGS, said: ‘Combining the effects of potential

pent-up demand, a more stable oil price through the second half of 2020 and an expectation of higher oil prices in 2021, PGS believes in increasing activity levels through 2021. Despite the impacts of the Covid-19 crisis, energy consumption is expected to continue to increase in the future with oil and gas continuing to play an important role in the energy mix. Offshore reserves will be vital for future supply and support the demand for marine seismic services. The expected future recovery of the seismic industry is likely to benefit from the recent further industry capacity reductions.

‘We expect higher revenues from vessel operations going forward. We have an acceptable leads basket for multi-client data library sales and expect higher sales in the fourth quarter, compared to the average of the previous three quarters.’

CGG reported that it had been working on four multi-client programmes in the third quarter: three marine streamer surveys – Nebula in Brazil, Gippsland in Australia and North Viking Graben in Norway, and one ocean bottom node survey in the UK North Sea. Multi-client after-sales of $34 million were up 120% quarter-on-quarter.

Chris Usher, ION’s president and chief executive officer, said: ‘We are seeing a number of constructive developments evidenced by more stable oil prices FIRST

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and clearer definition of E&P budgets.

Based on these trends and high levels of client engagement on specific deals, including a number postponed from the third quarter, we expect the fourth quarter to be significantly better than the second quarter with the potential to approach our fourth quarter results from last year.

‘Backlog increased 77% sequentially, reversing several consecutive quarters of steady decline due to our strategic shift to enter the 3D new acquisition multi-client market.

‘Although we expect the market will remain challenging, we see indications for improving offshore E&P industry dynamics and continue to anticipate significant growth in digitalization over the next decade.’

However, Duncan Eley warned that seismic fleets will need to be reduced even further for the industry to become viable again. ‘The reshaping of the marine seismic industry, resulting in fewer acquisition companies, has led to an improved industry structure. Four vessels have been removed from the global vessel count since the end of 2019 resulting in 19 global active vessels at the end of Q3 2020. With only 12 of these 19 vessels working on projects going into Q4 2020, further supply-side discipline will be required in order to mitigate reduced demand observed in 2020.’

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Shearwater and CGG suspend plans for technology partnership Shearwater GeoServices and CGG have cancelled plans to establish a marine streamer technology partnership. Due to the downturn in the oil and gas industry, triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, Shearwater and CGG have jointly agreed to suspend negotiations regarding the partnership.

In June 2019 Shearwater and CGG entered a strategic partnership for marine seismic acquisition services and the creation of a new streamer technology company.

As part of the deal in which Shearwater purchased five streamer vessels jointly owned by CGG Marine Resources Norge and Eidesvik Offshore, the two companies agreed to create a technology partnership, under the Sercel brand name and CGG’s majority ownership, for the development, manufacturing, commercialization and

Polarcus reports third quarter net loss of $13 million Polarcus has recorded a net loss of $13 million on revenues of $25 million compared to a net loss of $18 million on revenues of $23 in Q2 and a net profit of $14 million on revenues of $103 million in Q3 2019.

The company’s operating loss was $4 million compared with an operating loss of $10 million in Q2 and an operating profit of $22 million in Q3 2019.

Total cash at quarter-end was $32.4 million compared to $44.8 million at the end of the previous quarter.

Polarcus CEO, Duncan Eley, said: ‘Polarcus continues to secure new projects despite the challenging market conditions, with four new awards announced since the end of Q2 2020.’

Backlog at 30 September 2020 is estimated at $139 million compared to $141 million at the end of Q2 2020.

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Amazon Conquerer would have benefited from the new streamer technology.

support of marine streamer seismic acquisition systems.

‘Due to the downturn in the oil and gas industry, triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, CGG and Shearwater have jointly agreed to suspend negotiations around creating a marine streamer equipment JV. Both Shearwater and CGG confirm their commitment to the technology advancements needed in the industry and remain open to explore future cooperation

on technology in the years to come,’ said Irene Waage Basili, the CEO of Shearwater GeoServices.

Meanwhile, Shearwater GeoServices has won a contract for a large 3D seismic acquisition and depth processing contract in the Europe, Africa and Middle East (EAME) region. The survey, for a national oil company, is expected to take six months to complete, commencing in Q4.

TGS reports third quarter loss of $71 million TGS has reported a third-quarter net loss of $71 million on revenues of $80 million compared with a net loss of $80 million on revenues of $96 million in Q2 2020 and a net profit of $40 million on revenues of $264 million in the third quarter of 2019.

The company reported an operating loss of $90 million compared with a loss of $97 million in Q2 and an operating profit of $55 million in Q3 2019.

Net segment revenues of $80.6 compared with $96 million in Q2 and $264 million in Q3 2019. Pre-funding revenues of $17.4 million compared with $38 million in Q2 and $60 million in Q3 2019.

Late sales of $61 million compared with $58 million in Q2 and $201 million in Q3 2019. Proprietary revenues of $2.5 million compared with $3 million in Q2 and $3.3 million in Q3 2019.

Multi-client investments in the quarter amounted to $54 million.

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Personnel costs and other operating costs for the quarter totalled $17.3 million, a reduction of 64% compared to the third quarter of 2019.

Free cash flow was $4.5 million for Q3 2020 compared to -$35.6 million in Q3 2019. As a result, the cash balance on 30 September 2020 was $180 million.

TGS’ backlog amounted to $102.1 million at the end of Q3 2020, up 4% compared to $98.1 million at the end of Q2 2020. Backlog at the end of the quarter decreased 13% from backlog of $117 million at the end of Q3 2019.

TGS CEO Kristian Johansen said: ‘To further strengthen our cash flow capacity, we have completed a major cost cutting programme with cash operating cost reduced by 64% compared to Q3 2019. As such, we are well prepared to maintain our counter-cyclical investment approach at the same time as continuing to pay dividends to shareholders.’

INDUSTRY NEWS

CGG reports net loss of $98 million GG has reported a group net loss of $98 on revenues of $178 million compared to a group net loss of $147 million on revenues of $239 million in Q2 and group net profit of $41 million on revenues of $323 million in the third quarter of 2019.

The company posted an operating loss of $43 million compared to an operating loss of $32 million in Q2 and an operating profit of $98 million in Q3 2019.

GGR segment revenue was $150 million, up 4% quarter-on-quarter.

Geoscience revenue was $77 million, down 7% quarter-on-quarter. Multi-Client revenue was $73 million, up 18% quarter-on-quarter. Prefunding revenue

of multi-client projects was $39 million, down 15% quarter-on-quarter. Prefunding rate was 68%. Multi-client after-sales were $34 million driven by Brazil and US Gulf of Mexico, up 120% quarter-on-quarter. GGR segment operating income was -$25 million.

Equipment segment revenue was $50 million, down 14% quarter-on-quarter.

Land equipment sales represented 62% of total sales, including more than 50,000 508XT channels mainly in Russia and India. Sercel also delivered its first land node WiNG system in North America.

Marine equipment sales represented 29% of total sales driven by spares sections sales of Sentinel streamers’ installed base. Downhole equipment sales were

$2 million and sales from non oil and gas equipment were $3 million. Equipment segment posted an operating loss of $9 million.

Sophie Zurquiyah, CGG CEO, said: ‘CGG markets stabilized in Q3 as large independents and NOCs started to resume activity, mainly in their core areas. We are on track with the implementation of the cost reduction plan resulting in increased Adjusted EBITDAs. We have been able to maintain market share in our core businesses throughout the year, and I have been pleased with our progress towards developing offerings in adjacent fields, including structural health monitoring, CCUS, geothermal and environmental geosciences.’

PGS reports third quarter net loss of $32 million PGS has reported a third quarter net loss of $32 million on revenues of $116 million, compared to a net loss of $111 million on revenues of $139 million in Q2 and a net profit of $31.5 million on revenues of $234 million in Q3 2019.

The company made an operating loss of $4.3 million, compared to an operating loss of $82 million in Q2 2020 and an operating profit of $50 million in Q3 2019.

PGS reported multiclient prefunding levels of $50.4 million, with a prefunding level of 89%, compared to prefunding of 94.9 million with a prefunding level of 125% in Q3 2019. Multi-client late sales of $28.3 million compared with $53.9 million in Q3 2109. Contract revenues of $9.3 million compared with $76.3 million in Q3 2019. Imaging revenues of $4.5 million compared to $8.7 million in Q3 2019.

Rune Olav Pedersen, PGS president and chief executive officer, said: ‘The widespread disruptions in the oil market and the significant reduction in energy companies’ 2020 budget continued to impact the seismic market in the third quarter. Our vessel utilization ended at

71%, of which a large majority was allocated to multi-client. The standby time of 11% reflects the dramatic reduction of activity levels and challenge of securing acquisition projects into the winter season.

‘The revised and significantly lower 2020 investment plans among energy companies have significantly reduced demand for seismic services. A majority of the reduction is postponements to 2021 and beyond, in order for the energy companies to protect cash flow in a period where the Covid-19 pandemic has caused extreme disruptions in the oil market.

‘To preserve liquidity and secure business continuity we have over the last months engaged and negotiated with our lenders. Towards the end of the quarter we announced an agreement in principle with a majority of them on main terms.

I am pleased that we have now signed up with a sufficient majority of lenders and will proceed to swiftly implement the agreement on a consensual basis if we achieve 100% support from lenders. Alternatively, the solution will be implemented by using a UK scheme of

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arrangement, for which we have support from the required super majority of lenders. No debt maturities and no scheduled debt amortization until September 2022, together with our substantial cost reductions, will improve our liquidity and enable us to manoeuvre through these challenging times.’

The company has reduced annual gross cash costs by more than 33% to below $400 million. Cash flow from operations of $65.9 million, compared to $151.9 million in Q3 2019.

Based on five 3D vessels operated for the remaining part of 2020, PGS expects full-year 2020 gross cash costs to be below $450 million, excluding severance and other restructuring costs of approximately $35 million.

2020 multi-client cash investments are expected to be approximately $225 million. Capital expenditure for 2020 is expected to be below $40 million.

The order book totalled $160 million at September 30, 2020 (including $52 million relating to multi-client). The order book was $155 million at June 30, 2020 and $336 million at September 30, 2019.

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CGG reimages Walker Ridge data in the Gulf of Mexico

Some 300 OCS blocks are covered by the survey. Final products are expected in February 2021.

CGG has started a new seismic data reimaging programme in the Walker Ridge area in the US Gulf of Mexico.

The Walker Ridge programme covers approx. 300 OCS blocks including two priority areas of significant industry interest, said CGG. The company’s Walker Ridge Wide-Azimuth and StagSeis DEUX surveys will provide input for the project and

the reprocessed data will deliver imaging with two priority discovery areas being processed on an accelerated schedule.

Final products are expected in February 2021 and May 2021 respectively, ahead of the full programme results, due by the end of 2021.

The target of CGG’s new programme is the prolific Wilcox formation which

is deformed by thrusts and folds beneath multiple thick salt sheets and shales that have historically been difficult to image.

CGG will reprocess existing data with 3D deghosting, 3D SRME and its new velocity modelling technologies, including Time-Lag FWI and FWI imaging.

Preliminary test results show significant uplift in imaging of the subsalt fold-belts and continuity of reflectors within the Eocene and Paleocene exploration targets, said CGG. Sophie Zurquiyah, CEO, CGG, said: ‘Production in the Walker Ridge area has been consistent and continues to grow with recent discoveries. We are continually developing new technology and techniques that we can apply to existing data to provide our clients with the best, most technically advanced images of the subsurface. Advances in technology and the results from this project will allow for more efficient decision-making in finding and producing oil and gas.’

TGS heads back to Nigeria for coring project TGS has restarted a geochemical coring project offshore Nigeria. The initiative is part of an anomaly targeting programme focusing on the previously completed analysis of multibeam and backscatter data.

In partnership with Nigerian joint venture partner TGS-PetroData, the coring leg began on 15 October and completion was planned for late November. The project covers an area of approx. 82,000 km2 offshore Nigeria and will incorporate 17 seabed heat flow measurements and 253 seabed cores whose location is based on multibeam and backscatter anomalies.

These data are complemented by TGS’ NGRE19 2D seismic data reprocessed last year to take advantage of modern seismic imaging techniques. Once coring is concluded, geochemistry is undertaken in a world-class laboratory with preliminary results available daily and final reports ready for industry review in Q1 2021.

Kristian Johansen, CEO at TGS, said: ‘This multibeam and seismic coverage alongside coring and geochemical analy26

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TGS will incorporate 253 seabed cores into the 82,000 km2 project offshore Nigeria.

sis will further derisk the offshore region and speed up exploration decision-making in an area which is likely to see a growing level of licensing activity in the near

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future. With the progress of the Petroleum Industry Bill the opportunities to further explore offshore Nigeria have never been more appealing.’

INDUSTRY NEWS

PGS releases data offshore Brazil PGS has released the data on its Campos Deepwater GeoStreamer X survey over the emerging play in the outboard Campos Basin, offshore Brazil.

The new dataset targets 14,500 km2 in the Campos Basin, including open acreage offered in the 17th Bidding Round; presalt open acreage adjacent to the Albacora and Marlim Leste fields and areas acquired and under contract in the 14th Bidding Round, with drilling operations underway to test large presalt structures.

PSDM products now available include Kirchhoff, Beam, and RTM interpretations.

The GeoStreamer X project was acquired with 10km-long offsets to improve depth velocity modelling accuracy of the postsalt, salt, and presalt sections.

Ramform Titan acquired the 6500 km2 Phase-1 area, towing the largest seismic spread ever offshore Brazil: employing a 14 x 100 x 10,050 m configuration.

The new Campos Deepwater GeoStreamer X acquisition overlays existing multi-client 3D seismic data from PGS. This was reprocessed in parallel and completed in August. Incorporating the new

acquisition with reprocessed orthogonal MC3D datasets (8 km offsets) will provide a multi-azimuth solution, enabling improved illumination of the subsurface structures found within the presalt plays in this portion of the Campos Basin.

Deepwater open acreage to be offered in the upcoming 17th Bidding Round can be analysed on the newly released fasttrack dataset.

Full-integrity PSDM products will be available in Q2 2021, along with gravity and magnetic data for regional basin analysis and GeoStreamer data.

Fast-track data is available now for presalt open acreage, said PGS. PSDM products will be available in Q1 2021 and the multi-azimuth products will include ~3000 km2 of TTI Kirchhoff and both single and multi-azimuth RTM (45Hz) PSDM products.

John Cramer, sales and services area manager for Brazil, said: ‘We successfully completed the acquisition of the first phase of this programme despite the challenges caused by the global pandemic.

The fast-tack products are ready now and

Ramform Titan acquired 6500 km2 of data.

we will have full-integrity depth products available prior to the Brazil 17th Bidding Round in 2021. In addition, we will have the first full-integrity GeoStreamer X products available over open presalt acreage in Campos in Q1 2021, and we hope to nominate these blocks for upcoming Presalt Sharing Rounds.’

Ramform Titan has now completed her first-ever yard stay and will be heading back to Campos to acquire an additional 8000 km2 on this programme. PGS will offer additional fast-track products over further 17th Round blocks prior to the round.

ION and Shearwater launch phase one of big 3D North Sea mutli-client survey

Final data will be delivered in April 2021.

ION Geophysical and Shearwater Geoservices have launched the initial phase of their North Sea 3D multi-client programme. While the majority of the up to

~11,000 km2 survey will be acquired next summer, phase one enables the company to complete the entire programme by the end of the 2021 season. The Mid North Sea High programme covers one of the last underexplored sections of the prolific UK Continental Shelf, and is now an area of industry focus following recent play-opening wells.

The existing infrastructure and proximity to the shore makes it attractive for future investment, said ION. Since the programme launched, additional acreage was awarded over the survey area. Final deliverables will be available in April 2021.

‘This programme marks our entry into the North Sea and completes one of the company’s top strategic objectives FIRST

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this year to enter the larger 3D new acquisition multi-client market,’ said Ken Williamson, executive vice-president and chief operating officer of ION’s E&P Technology and Services group. ‘We successfully acquired the most challenging shallow water section of the survey, where conflicts with other operations would have been more challenging in subsequent years. Utilizing the company’s Marlin and Orca software, ION’s Optimization Services team planned the project using an innovative digital methodology that incorporates impacts of ocean currents and nearby operations to make better decisions in real time. This assured maximum data collection during the available 2020 season and more uniform subsurface coverage.’

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PGS, TGS and WesternGeco team up for huge 3D survey offshore Malaysia A seismic consortium comprising PGS, TGS and WesternGeco has been awarded a multi-year contract by Petronas through competitive bidding to acquire and process up to 105,000 km2 of multi-sensor multi-client 3D data in the Sarawak Basin, offshore Malaysia.

This contract award follows a campaign by the consortium in the Sabah offshore region of Malaysia, awarded in 2016, in which more than 50,000 km2 of high-quality 3D seismic data have been acquired and licensed to the oil and gas industry to support the Malaysia licensing round and exploration activity.

The Sarawak award will enable the consortium to carry out a multi-phase programme to promote exploration efforts in the prolific Sarawak East Natuna Basin (deepwater North Luconia and West Luconia Province).

Nathan Oliver, PGS executive vice-president sales and services, said: ‘Since this same consortium is also acquiring multi-client data offshore Sabah, we have demonstrated the benefit of the multi-client business model to the Malaysian authorities and provided the oil and gas industry with high-quality seismic data in this prolific hydrocarbon basin. With this new award we are able to expand the multi-client coverage into the

Some 105,000 km2 of 3D data will be acquired for Petronas in the Sarawak Basin.

Sarawak region to increase exploration and enhance production activities.’

Rune Eng, TGS executive vice president, international said: ‘The consortium will play its part in encouraging and enhancing future exploration in Malaysia, enabling E&P companies to participate in the acquisition of high-quality modern 3D seismic data on a cost-effective regional basis.’

Rajeev Sonthalia, president, Digital and Integration, Schlumberger, said:

‘Modern data will be used both to enhance existing production assets and develop new play concepts in areas where legacy data has failed to provide the insight needed to find new opportunities with a high degree of confidence.’

The consortium is planning the initial phases and is engaging with the oil and gas industry to secure prefunding ahead of planned acquisition, covering both open blocks and areas of existing farm-in opportunities.

Searcher reprocesses South Africa data Searcher Seismic has launched a multi-client 2D and 3D seismic rectification project offshore South Africa, in collaboration with the Petroleum Agency of South Africa.

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The seismic data covers the Outeniqua Basin and its sub-basins; the Bredasdorp, Infanta, Pletmos, Gamtoos, Algoa and Southern Outeniqua Basins. Searcher has applied its proprietary post-stack reprocessing method to rectify navigation, metadata, amplitude, phase and time creating a contiguous database that it said can be easily loaded into any interpretation software.

Neil Hodgson, Searcher’s VP GeoScience, said ‘With the success of the Luiperd-1 well proving the spectacular

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commercial resource potential offshore South Africa, this then is an incredible time to be bringing a ready-to-interpret dataset over the basin to the industry.

The Cretaceous source rocks of the Brulpadda-Luiperd trend extend along the margin on the north side of the Agulhas Transform, which provides a depositional onlap for hybrid clastic systems being brought to the basin floor. Brulpadda and Luiperd are just beginning. We can confidently expect a lot more to come in this nascent superbasin.’

INDUSTRY NEWS

Oil production break-even price drops to $50 per barrel, says Rystad A Rystad Energy analysis of oil production costs has revealed that the average break-even price has dropped to around $50 per barrel.

This represents a 10% reduction over the last two years, and 35% since 2014, making new offshore deepwater developments much more viable, Rystad said.

In 2014 Rystad had estimated that the required oil price for producing 100 million barrels per day in 2025 was close to $90 per barrel, an estimate revised in 2018 to around $55 per barrel.

‘The implication of falling breakeven prices is that the upstream industry, over the last two years, has become more competitive than ever and is able to supply more volumes at a lower price,’ said Espen Erlingsen, head of upstream research at Rystad Energy.

When it comes to breakeven prices and potential liquids supply in 2025 for the main sources of new production, Rystad Energy data shows that from 2014 to 2018, tight oil and OPEC came out on top.

Back in 2014, Rystad Energy estimated the average breakeven price for tight oil to be $82 per barrel and potential supply

in 2025 at 12 million bpd. In 2018, Rystad estimated an average breakeven price for tight oil of $47 per barrel and a potential supply of 22 million bpd. After 2018, the break-even price for tight oil has continued to fall, reaching a current average of $44 per barrel. However, Rystad now estimates that tight oil can potentially supply around 18 million bpd of liquids in 2025.

This drop is due to the sharp reduction in tight oil production during the first half of this year. ‘The lower activity this year, and a potentially slow recovery next year, will remove tight oil supply from the market,’ Rystad said.

Between 2014 and 2018, shelf and deepwater projects experienced a cost reduction of around 30%. However, the lack of new sanctioning during the same period reduced the offshore potential liquids supply for 2025. Since 2018, breakeven prices have been falling for offshore, with deepwater down 16% and shallow water down 10%.

This cost reduction puts average break-even prices for deepwater just below those of tight oil. At the same time, the potential 2025 supply from offshore

developments has remained more or less the same. This makes offshore a winner out of all the supply sources over the last two years when it comes to cost improvements and supply potential.

Onshore Middle East is the least expensive source of new production with an average break-even price of around $30 per barrel. This is also the segment with one of the largest resource potential estimates. Offshore deepwater is the second cheapest source of new production, with an average break-even price of $43 per barrel while onshore supply in Russia remains one of the more expensive resources due to the high gross taxes in the country. Shelf remains the segment with the largest resource potential with 131 billion barrels of unsanctioned volumes.

One of the key drivers of the improved costs and break-even prices for upstream developments are the lower unit prices within the industry. After the 2015 oil price collapse, oilfield service companies needed to reduce the prices they charged E&P companies in order to remain competitive in the challenging market conditions, said Rystad.

Oil majors form partnership to develop offshore CO2 storage in the UK North Sea

BP, Eni, Equinor, National Grid, Shell and Total have formed the Northern Endurance Partnership (NEP), to develop offshore carbon dioxide (CO2) transport and storage infrastructure in the UK North Sea. This infrastructure will serve the proposed Net

Zero Teesside (NZT) and Zero Carbon Humber (ZCH) projects that aim to establish decarbonized industrial clusters in Teesside and Humberside in the north of the UK. NZT and ZCH decarbonization projects are aimed at kick-starting decarbonization of industry and power in two of the UK’s largest industrial clusters. Both projects will be commissioned by 2026 and it is hoped that they will achieve net zero as early as 2030 through a combination of carbon capture, hydrogen and fuel-switching.

If successful, NEP linked to NZT and ZCH will allow decarbonization of nearly 50% of the UK’s industrial emissions.

NEP, operated by BP, has submitted a bid for funding from Phase 2 of the UK FIRST

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government’s Industrial Decarbonisation Challenge, aiming to accelerate the development of an offshore pipeline network to transport-captured CO2 emissions from both NZT and ZCH to offshore geological storage beneath the UK North Sea. The £170 million Industrial Decarbonization Challenge is part of the £4.7bn Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund set up to address the biggest industrial and societal challenges using research and development based in the UK. The application follows the approval by the UK Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) of the addition of BP and Equinor alongside National Grid to the Endurance carbon storage licence.

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CGG starts next phase of big 3D project in Campos and Santos basins offshore Brazil CGG’s Nebula 3D Phase I project offshore Brazil is nearing completion and acquisition will soon commence on Phase II. Nebula 3D is a large, long-offset BroadSeis survey located in the prospective Campos and Santos Basins offshore Brazil. Phase I covers approx. 17,700 km2 on the southeastern side of the survey area providing 3D data coverage where currently no other 3D data exists. Phase II covers approx. 10,000 km2 on the northern side of the survey area with underlying broadband datasets that will provide input for dual-azimuth imaging.

The Nebula Phase II dual azimuth data will better illuminate pre-salt events and address significant challenges posed by thick volcanic layers in this portion of the survey. CGG’s subsurface imaging centre in Rio de Janeiro will employ processing technology including Interbed Multiple Attenuation and proprietary time-lag FWI that CGG claims will dramatically improve the velocity model and produce clearer, more focused subsurface images of this prolific pre-salt area.

Phase II is expected to start in early December and acquisition will be carried

Oceanic Sirius will acquire 10,000 km2 of data in the Nebula Phase II survey.

out by the Shearwater vessel Oceanic Sirius. Fast-track results are expected in Q4 2021 and final products are expected Q1 2022, which will include a TTI Kirchhoff PSDM, a TTI RTM 45Hz and a LSRTM 45Hz. Sophie Zurquiyah, CEO CGG, said: ’The Brazilian Pre-Salt is the largest worldwide oil discovery in the last decades and it is the most important exploration play in the world, highly coveted by all supermajor oil companies and by new players willing to enter in this prospective sector. This addition to our already very large 3D multi-client library in the Santos and Campos basins underlines our commitment to offering the industry ultramodern data sets to support optimized exploration and development of the entire pre-salt area.’

As a result of the start of Phase II, Shearwater Geoservices has won a five-month contract extension for CGG to carry on acquiring data in the region.

‘The extension provides a solid addition to our firm backlog for the northern winter, and austral summer season’, said Irene Waage Basili, the CEO of Shearwater GeoServices.

PGS releases Viking Graben data

OFG and EMGS collaborate on CSEM technology

PGS has released data from its GeoStreamer X Viking Graben 2019 programme in the Lille Prinsen area, North Sea. The company said that the data delivers an ‘impressive uplift’ in subsurface resolution of the highly prolific Viking Graben, which has multiple proven and partially stacked plays covering Eocene Grid sands to Zechstein carbonates and fractured/weathered basement.

Multi-azimuth illumination and broadband processing have addressed the multiple subsurface imaging challenges that beset this area, said PGS. These range from shallow subsurface channels and glacial features, Tertiary low-velocity anomalies and high-velocity sand injectites (V-brights), to multiple contaminations in the polygonal faulted Paleogene and below the high impedance rugose Chalk.

PGS said that it would soon release fast-track data from the 2020 GeoStreamer X survey over Balder/Ringhorne.

Ocean Floor Geophysics (OFG) and EMGS have signed a cooperation agreement under which the two companies will work together to promote marine CSEM technology.

The agreement will exploit synergies between the towed-streamer CSEM system from OFG (under its exclusive right to acquire the PGS EM technology) and the sea-bottom CSEM/MT nodal system from EMGS. Cooperation will include development of proprietary and multi-client surveys, and multiphysics reprocessing of existing seismic and CSEM data.

‘We see industry collaboration as key for advancing the EM technology. This agreement allows us to expand our acquisition offering to also include the towed-streamer technology and together with OFG we will continue to work on expanding the CSEM market and the range of CSEM applications,’ said Bjørn Petter Lindhom, CEO of EMGS.

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PGS and ION collaborate on joint data package offshore Trinidad PGS and ION are offering a 2D data package comprising more than 25,615 km offshore Trinidad and Tobago. Six datasets will cover areas being offered in the Trinidad Open Bid Round.

They are the Deepwater Atlantic Area of 966 km of long-offset 2D; the Patao High, 2352 km of high-resolution 2D seismic data; the Western Tobago Sub-Basin of 2448 km of long-offset broadband 2D data; the Trinidad Regional Line of 5700 km of high-quality, long-offset, PSDM seismic data supplemented by 5200 km of deeply imaged reprocessing on a tight 4 km grid; and the 4900 km Darien Ridge reprocessed vintage data which is located off the east coast of Trinidad.

The Neogene-Recent deepwater Trinidadian basins were formed during

Data will cover areas in a bidding round.

the arrival of the Caribbean Plate by a complex interaction with the pre-existing Atlantic Plate. This west-to-east collision resulted in the subduction of the Atlantic Plate by the overriding Caribbean Plate and an oblique collision with the northern South American passive margin.

This advancement of the Caribbean was coeval with the Miocene initiation of the Orinoco Delta in the eastern Venezue-

la-Trinidad region and was responsible for the deposition of main reservoir intervals in the basin.

In the deep water, sediment loading from the delta-generated shale walls and diapirs in the Columbus Basin while strike-slip faulting in the Tobago Trough to the north, formed basement highs such as the Patao KK High. Both basin settings offer significant structural and stratigraphic trap potential.

Shales from the Late Cretaceous Naparima Hill and Gautier formations constitute the main source rock in this region, equivalent to the Canje Formation offshore Guyana. Additionally, the Early Miocene oil-prone Cipero formation source rock has potential for maturity where burial depth is sufficient in the deepwater Columbus Basin.

SCAN maps Dutch subsurface for geothermal potential

Sites are being tested all over the country.

The SCAN research programme 2D seismic survey has acquired more than 800 km of data to investigate potential geothermal energy sites in the Netherlands.

Project partners EBN and TNO have overseen 2D seismic acquisition and reprocessing of existing 2D vintage data.

The next phase of the government-funded project is to drill multiple research wells to further de-risk the subsurface.

‘Limited knowledge of the subsurface is often an inhibiting factor for potential geothermal projects. That is why SCAN takes this important first step by acquiring high quality data to help accelerate the application of geothermal energy and make it part of the sustainable energy mix in the Netherlands,’ said a SCAN project statement. ‘All data and results are shared publicly and are available for interpretation by experts and for educational, research, and training applications.’

The first five lines of the newly acquired SCAN 2D seismic data acquired by the contractor Rossingh Geophysics are now available via nlog.nl/en/scan-2dFIRST

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seismic-data. Seismic processing company DownUnder GeoSolutions (DUG) has been contracted for the processing of the first 1000 km of 2D seismic data. ‘The new data is of high quality and show the existence of potentially interesting geothermal reservoirs,’ said the SCAN project team.

Specialists are recovering and reprocessing existing vintage data, mainly recorded in the 1980s, from different operator archives and applying modern processing techniques and computing power to improve the seismic imaging.

Currently well over a thousand kilometres of 2D reprocessed data have been made available through the NLog platform.

SCAN intends to drill multiple wells to provide more information about properties such as permeability and the overall quality of the reservoirs.

Find out more at scanaardwarmte.nl.

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Searcher Seismic starts airborne surveys in Western Australia

Cessna aircraft will carry out the AGG projects over the Perth Basin.

Searcher Seismic has acquired two proprietary airborne exploration surveys over the onshore Perth Basin, to be acquired on behalf of Mitsui E&P Australia (MEPAU).

The new airborne geophysical data includes two surveys over three of

MEPAU’s onshore Perth Basin permits (EP455, L4 and L5) located in the Shire of Coorow and Shire of Carnamah.

The Warradarge Airborne Gravity Gradiometry (AGG) survey will be acquired first using a Cessna C208

operated by CGG Aviation Pty Ltd. The measurement of small local changes in the earth’s gravity field will provide information on the subsurface geological units and structures.

The aircraft undertaking this survey will fly 150 m above ground level at a speed of 120 knots (220 km/hour), with survey lines spaced approx. 500 m apart.

The Woolmulla Aeromagnetic/Radiometric survey will then be acquired by MAGSPEC Airborne Surveys Pty Ltd. A magnetometer mounted in a tail stinger of a Cessna C210 will measure the intensity of the magnetic field across the survey area.

The aircraft undertaking this survey will fly 60 m above ground level at a speed of 120 knots (220 km/hour), with survey lines spaced in a grid 200 m x 2 km apart.

Each survey will take about a week.

CGG enhances reservoir characterization software CGG GeoSoftware has released new versions of its Cloud-ready reservoir characterization and petrophysical interpretation software Jason Workbench 10.2 offering enhanced display options, upgraded QCs and monitoring, and more user-friendly interfaces.

The Python machine learning ecosystem contains additional basic and advanced sample scripts and Jupyter notebooks, making it easier for clients to build their own workflows. Geostatistical reservoir characterization technology has been optimized.

Meanwhile, HampsonRussell 10.6 now includes an interactive radon analyser, an AVO interpretation crossplot template, easier retrieval of inversion models, greater parameter flexibility and a new inversion algorithm.

PowerLog 10.2 for petrophysical interpretation now offers improvements in handling big data and data preparation automation for patching curves. A complete automated log editing workflow is available through a collection of modules which 32

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Probabilistic Net Pay in the Gulf of Mexico.

includes outlier detection, log patching, and synthetic curve generation. As a critical part of PowerLog’s patented workflow, outlier detection enables users to detect data spikes and anomalies and then replace bad data with patches or synthetic curves. The resulting high-quality curve data is essential in generating accurate interpretations, pore pressure predictions, and for use in seismic inverse modelling, said CGG. Capabilities in the Rock Physics software have also been enriched with new rock

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physics models, regression, curve fitting and an enhanced interface.

InsightEarth 3.6 now has new features, including the recently announced WellPath interactive well path planning technology.

The WellPath QuickPlan workflow automates planning for large multi-well pads or platforms and builds all well plans simultaneously.

Meanwhile, CGG has won data management contracts worth $10 million.

The most significant contract is a global framework agreement signed with a big international energy company that provides for the digitization and multi-year storage of its legacy data and ‘services related to understanding and extracting the maximum value from this asset’.

Sophie Zurquiyah, CEO, CGG, said: ‘As the focus of exploration shifts to mature provinces and new technologies are leveraged for analysing rapidly expanding data volumes, gaining access to and the integration of legacy data have never been more critical.’

INDUSTRY NEWS

Northern Lights partners make CO2 storage data available Project partners in the Northern Lights CO2 storage project Equinor, Shell and Total are making datasets from the confirmation well 31/5-7 Eos in the North Sea publicly available.

The data from the well drilled earlier this year have been acquired through coring, logging, sampling and a production test and have confirmed a suitable reservoir for the storage of CO2.

The released data, which will be made available via Equinor’s OMNIA platform, discloses relevant subsurface data including well log data, core data and well test data.

‘The Northern Lights project believes data sharing can play an important role in

BRIEFS Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) has won seven blocks out of 12 offered in India’s OALP Bid Round-V.The state-owned company won three blocks in the Cambay basin and blocks in the Bengal-Purnea, Gujarat Kutch, Gujarat Saurashtra and Mumbai basins. State-owned Oil India Ltd won four blocks, two in the Assam Shelf and Assam Arakan basin and two in the Rajasthan basin.

building trust in the technology as well as unlocking value and innovation potential in the CCS industry,’ said Sverre Overå, project director.

The 31/5-7 confirmation well (Eos) within EL001 licence was drilled and tested from 2 December 2019 to 7 March 2020.

The Eos well targeted the Dunlin Group Geological formation as the primary storage, where the sandstone-bearing Cook and Johansen formations both can serve as storage units for the injected CO2.

The cap rock consists of impermeable claystones called the Drake Formation, which prevents the CO2 from migrating out of the Dunlin Group.

Polarcus has won a two-month contract for 3D seismic data acquisition services in West Africa with an expected duration of two months. The project is scheduled to commence in Q4 2020.

Patkistan has launched a new bidding round for 20 onshore blocks. Date for bid submissions is January 15 2021.

SeaBird reports Q3 revenues of $3 million SeaBird has reported third quarter revenues of $3 million, down from $16 million in Q3 2019 and an EBITDA loss of $0.6 million compared with a $1.6 million loss in Q3 2019.

Vessel utilization of 28% was down from 68% in Q3 2019. However, it reported that tendering activity improved in October and announced a

EMGS has reported third quarter revenues of $2.1 million, down from $26.9 million in the third quarter of 2019 and down from $7.5 million in the second quarter of 2020. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $1.2 million, down from $11.6 million in the third quarter of 2019.

2D award in the Eastern Hemisphere after the end of the quarter.

The company will announce a new business area geared towards the green transition before the end of the year.

It has also won a contract for a 2D survey in the Asia Pacific region. The survey is expected to start in Q1 2021, with an estimated duration of 120 days.

Equinor has announced its ambition to become a net-zero energy company by 2050.

Baker Hughes is acquiring Compact Carbon Capture (3C). CCC’s technology uses rotating beds instead of static columns, effectively distributing solvents in a compact and modularized format. The technology enhances the carbon capture process resulting in up to 75% smaller footprint and lower costs, said Baker Hughes. The agreement includes intellectual property, personnel and existing deals.

PGS expands survey offshore Angola PGS has expanded its Angola MegaSurvey to include Block 16 PSTM GeoStreamer data, increasing 3D seismic data coverage over the prolific Lower Congo Basin.

The survey adds a further 3684 km2 of broadband data in the Lower Congo Basin ahead of the country’s 2021 licensing round. Total coverage of the Angola MegaSurvey is now more than 45,000 km2.

‘Several blocks covered by this new expanded Angola MegaSurvey dataset will be included as part of the ANPG scheduled 2021 Licensing Round. This is a highly prolific region and the 3D seismic

will enable companies to evaluate areas ahead of bid submission, encouraging further exploration,’ said Christine Roche, sales manager Africa, Mediterranean and Middle East at PGS. Exploration targets for these areas are found in several geological zones: the postsalt section contains the proven Miocene play with numerous producing oil fields. The Upper Cretaceous section remains relatively underexplored with multiple opportunities identified. The presalt section, which is likely to become the focus for future exploration efforts, has so far only been drilled in the shallow water.

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Total has made a significant gas condensate discovery on the Luiperd prospect, on Block 11B/12B in the Outeniqua Basin, 175 km off the southern coast of South Africa. The Luiperd well was drilled to a total depth of about 3400 m and encountered 73 m of net gas condensate pay in well-developed good quality Lower Cretaceous reservoirs.

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US announces latest sale in the Gulf of Mexico The US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has offered approximately 78 million acres for a regionwide lease sale, which was scheduled for 18 November, 2020. The sale will include all available unleased areas in federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

In addition, BOEM is offering a 10-year primary term in water depths of 800 m or deeper. The change means that leases in water depths of 800 m to 1600 m licensees will no longer need to earn an ‘extension’ of the primary term to achieve the full 10 years.

‘After a careful analysis of the past 10 years’ data, for Sale 256, BOEM is reverting to offering the 10-year primary term in these specific water depths,’ said BOEM in a statement. ‘Leases in 1600 m of water or deeper will continue to have the full 10-year term as in prior sales.’

Lease Sale 256, which will include approx. 14,755, unleased blocks, will be the seventh offshore sale under the 20172022 Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Oil and Gas Leasing Programme.

Meanwhile, the timeframe for decisions on an Application for Permit to

Drill (APD) and an Application for Permit to Modify (APM) has been extended.

Under the current practice, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) issues more than 90% of APMs and APDs in under 70 days. BSEE now has 75 days to approve an APD or APM. ‘This change is being made to facilitate efficient exploration and development of a lease area, consistent with all current practices pertaining to safety and environmental laws,’ said BOEM. Earlier this year, Lease Sale 254 generated $93 million in high bids.

Shearwater wins 3D project offshore Senegal Total has awarded Shearwater GeoServices a large towed-streamer 3D acquisition and processing project offshore Senegal.

The exploration survey covers 5000 km2 in the UDO Block Exploration area, offshore Senegal. The data acquisition will be carried out by the vessl SW Empress using an ultra-wide tow Flexisource configuration together with Fast Track processing enabled by Shearwater’s proprietary Reveal software.

‘We are pleased to be awarded this contract by Total in North West Africa,

providing us with back-to-back work for one of our vessels,’ said Irene Waage Basili, chief executive officer of Shearwater.

‘Leveraging our strong geographically dispersed fleet to drive efficiencies and minimize transit times and thereby create commercial and environmental benefits for our clients is a key element of our strategy.’

The two-month survey is scheduled to commence in Q4, 2020, adding to another recent award by Total to Shearwater for work in North West Africa’s MSGBC Basin.

SW Empress will acquire 5000 km2.

CGG completes geothermal study for big energy company CGG has completed a global geothermal resource study for a major energy company. The study evaluates the scale of the potential for geothermal energy around the world and provides insight into the role this alternative energy source can play in electrical power generation and heating within the energy transition.

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The client study leveraged CGG’s data transformation and analytics services to interrogate and quality control vast public data sets, and integrate these with key client data sets. The resulting database of more than 700,000 subsurface temperature data points was then used to evaluate the Earth’s heat resources and identify areas of the greatest geothermal energy potential.

Meanwhile, CGG has renewed and expanded its contract to power all its operating sites in the UK with renewable energy. After adopting renewable energy sources for its UK operations eight years ago, CGG has evaluated the green cre-

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dentials of its suppliers and recommitted to a REGO (Renewable Energy Guarantees Origin) backed contract to ensure that all electricity used is generated from renewable wind sources.

CGG’s clean energy contract now includes all of its geoscience sites in the UK, including Redhill, Crawley, Llandudno, Conwy and Edenbridge.

The company also uses this sustainable energy supply to power the CGG Cloud which provides compute resources for its geoscience activity throughout the wider EAME region, as well as its dedicated computing resources for a number of its European clients.

INDUSTRY NEWS

ION Geophysical reports third quarter net loss of $16.6 million ION Geophysical has reported a third quarter net loss of $16.6 million on revenues of $16.2 million, compared to a net loss $5.2 million on revenues of $22.7 million in the second quarter and a net loss of $3.7 million on revenues of $53.2 million in Q3 2019.

Year-to-date net loss was $24.1 million on revenues of $95.4 million compared to a net loss of $33.7 million on revenues of $132 million in the first nine months of 2019.

At quarter close, the company’s total liquidity of $59.4 million consisted of $51.1 million of cash (including net revolver borrowings of $22.5 million) and $8.3 million of remaining available borrowing capacity.

At September 30, 2020, backlog was $17.7 million or 77% higher compared to backlog at June 30, 2020.

Chris Usher, ION’s president and chief executive officer, said: ‘Despite the macroeconomic backdrop, we have made significant progress executing

our strategy. Backlog increased 77% sequentially, reversing several consecutive quarters of steady decline due to our strategic shift to enter the 3D new acquisition multi-client market. We successfully acquired the initial phase of our Mid North Sea High 3D multi-client programme and built backlog for the significantly larger second phase next summer.

‘Although we expect the market will remain challenging, we see indications for improving offshore E&P industry dynamics and continue to anticipate significant growth in digitalization over the next decade.’

E&P Technology & Services segment revenues were $10.1 million for the third quarter 2020 compared to $15.2 million for the second quarter of 2020 and $40.2 million for third quarter 2019. Multi-client revenues were $6.3 million, a decrease of 81% from third quarter 2019, primarily due to the lower volume of ION’s global data library

sales, as well as a decline in new venture revenues due to acquisition completion of a large new programme in the prior period. Imaging and Reservoir Services revenues were $3.8 million, a decrease of 46% from third quarter 2019 due to lower proprietary tender activity.

Operations Optimization segment revenues were $6.1 million for the third quarter 2020 compared to $7.5 million for the second quarter of 2020 and $13 million for third quarter of 2019. Optimization Software & Services net revenues were $3 million, a 57% decrease from third quarter 2019 due to reduced seismic activity and associated services demand resulting from Covid-19. Devices net revenues were $3.1 million, a 49% decrease from third quarter 2019 due to lower sales of towed streamer equipment spares and repairs.

Consolidated operating expenses were $12.5 million, a 42% decrease from $21.4 million in the third quarter 2019.

Total signs carbon reduction agreement with Abu Dhabi Total has signed an agreement with the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) to explore joint research on CO2 emission reductions and carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS).

Under the terms of the agreement, ADNOC and Total will jointly explore opportunities to reduce CO2 emissions,

improve energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy for oil and gas operations. In the area of CCUS the companies will develop joint research into new technologies covering carbon capture, storage solutions and enhanced oil recovery projects based on CO2 usage.

‘This initiative will allow the two

companies to join forces in several domains such as the reduction of carbon emissions on industrial sites, improvement of the energy efficiency in operations, and the development of innovative solutions and business models towards the CCUS chain.’ said Patrick Pouyanné, chairman & CEO of Total.

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Special Topic

DELIVERING FOR THE ENERGY CHALLENGE: TODAY AND TOMORROW The show must go on. The EAGE 2020 annual conference from 8 to 11 December will, as always, celebrate geoscience excellence, only that this time the annual gathering will be held digitally as a result of Covid-19 restrictions. This month we, feature papers that celebrate the diversity and ingenuity of the profession, which is delivering for the energy challenge.

Alireza Malehmir et al present five prototypes and six methodological solutions addressing increasing demand for high-resolution subsurface imaging and modelling algorithms.

Cyril Boissy presents the latest technological advances and results in precision clocks based on ultra-low power ovenized oscillators (OCXO), made with lower drift (SC-cut) and higher drift (AT-cut) resonators.

Huw James gives his view on how to achieve successful 3D seismic inversion.

Kim Gunn Maver et al discuss how machine learning (ML) can be used to organize data in such a way that E&P decision-making can be both substantially faster as well as scientifically and financially sounder.

Felicia Winter et al present their interpretation of several attractive late Cretaceous deep-water play types in the Harper Basin.

Martin Widmaier et al share progress made with towing marine sources wider to enable better acquisition efficiency and improved near offset coverage for more accurate seismic images.

Jenni Nicholls et al explain why quality control of seismic data has never been more important during a difficult period for the industry Carl Fredrik Gyllenhammar presents a methodology for evaluating whether wells that have been declared dry could potentially contain significant volumes of hydrocarbons.

Submit an article

Special Topic overview January

Land Seismic

First Break Special Topics are covered by a mix of original articles dealing with case studies and the latest technology. Contributions to a Special Topic in First Break can be sent directly to the editorial office (firstbreak@eage.org). Submissions will be considered for publication by the editor.

February

Reservoir Monitoring

March

Modelling / Interpretation

April

Digital Transformation in Geoscience

May

Global Exploration Hotspots

June

Delivering for the Energy Challenge: Today and Tomorrow

It is also possible to submit a Technical Article to First Break. Technical Articles are subject to a peer review process and should be submitted via EAGE’s ScholarOne website: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/fb

July

Unconventionals and Geochemistry

August

Near Surface Geo Mining

September

Reservoir Characterization

October

Geoscience & Engineering in the Energy Transition

November

Marine Seismic & EM

December

Delivering for the Energy Challenge: Today and Tomorrow

You can find the First Break author guidelines online at www.firstbreak.org/guidelines.

More Special Topics may be added during the course of the year.

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CALENDAR OF EVENTS 14-17 JUNE 2021

82nd EAGE Conference & Exhibition

Amsterdam, Netherlands www.eageannual2021.org

December 2020 1‑3 Dec

Second HGS and EAGE Conference on Latin America www.eage.org

Online

6-7 Dec

Eighth EAGE Workshop on Passive Seismic www.eage.org

Online

7‑9 Dec

First EAGE Workshop on Geothermal Energy and Hydro Power in Africa www.eage.org

Online

7‑9 Dec

International Conference of Young Scientists «GEOTERRACE-2020» https://openreviewhub.org/geoterrace

Online

7-8 Dec

Near Surface Geoscience Conference 2020 www.nsg2020.org

Online

8-11 Dec

EAGE 2020 Annual Conference & Exhibition Online www.eageonline2020.org

Online

14-16 Dec

Third EAGE Workshop on Pore Pressure Prediction www.eage.org

Online

17-18 Dec

EAGE/SEG Research Workshop on Geophysical Aspects of Smart Cities www.eage.org

Online

EAGE Events

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February 2021 First EAGE Workshop on Optimizing Project Turnaround Performance www.eage.org

London

United Kingdom

1‑3 Mar

EAGE GeoTech 2021 First EAGE Geophysical Monitoring Technology Conference and Exhibition www.eage.org

The Hague and online

Netherlands

8-10 Mar

Second EAGE Workshop on Machine Learning www.eage.org

Amsterdam and online

Netherlands

14‑18 Mar

SAGEEP 2021 www.sageep.org

Online

23-25 Mar

IPTC 2021 http://2021.iptcnet.org/

Kuala Lumpur

Malaysia

30-31 Mar

First EAGE Workshop on Borehole Geology in Asia Pacific www.eage.org

Perth and online

Australia

30 Mar 1 Apr

Fifth EAGE Eastern Africa Petroleum Geoscience Forum www.eage.org

Online

5‑7 Apr

Second EAGE Reservoir Characterization and Modelling Workflows for Giant Carbonate Field Developments of the Middle East www.eage.org

Ras Al Khaimah

12‑14 Apr

EAGE Workshop on Quantifying Uncertainty in Depth Imaging www.eage.org

Online

19‑22 Apr

IOR 2021 www.eage.org

Vienna and online

19‑23 Apr

EAGE Asia Pacific Virtual Geoscience Week www.eage.org

Online

26‑30 Apr

Engineering and Mining Geophysics 2021 www.eage.org

Gelendzhik and online

Russia

4‑6 May

Fifth AAPG/EAGE Myanmar Oil & Gas Conference www.eage.org

Yangon

Myanmar

10‑12 May

Second EAGE Workshop on Underground Storage of Hydrogen www.eage.org

Amsterdam

Netherlands

10‑12 May

First EAGE Workshop on East Canada Offshore Exploration www.eage.org

St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador

Canada

82 nd EAGE Conference & Exhibition www.eageannual2021.org

Amsterdam

Netherlands

22‑24 Feb March 2021

April 2021 United Arab Emirates

Austria

May 2021

June 2021 14-17 Jun

EAGE Events

Non-EAGE Events

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Now On Demand GeoStreamer X What, Where, Why: Ask the Experts webinar

Catch up on what our experts said in this live panel discussion. We answered your questions, gave an introduction to the GeoStreamer X solution and shared a first glance at the impressive uplift in Viking Graben 2019 data.

Register to view: www.pgs.com/Live