Plans for drilling now underway
Recent projects completed by Moveout show how legacy seismic survey data can create considerable value. The seismic data specialist tackled two surveys acquired in the early nineties, for Summit Exploration and Production; remastering data residing on over 10,500 IBM 3480 tapes. Analysis of the final reprocessed data enabled Summit to make decisions on exploration, which in the case of the second survey has resulted in a planned drilling program.
Although Summit decided not to proceed with drilling in the area covered by the first survey, this decision was taken sooner and at far lower cost than if a new survey had been commissioned. It was a different story with the second survey, remastered and nav-merged last year, as drilling is now planned as a result of data recovered through Moveout’s work. This survey wasn’t without its challenges, as the seismic data was missing any raw or processed navigation data and all attempts to locate it were unsuccessful. This could have spelt the end of the project if it hadn’t been for Moveout’s own METASEIS software and the skills of its data experts. “METASEIS has been created to enable Moveout to provide its clients with bespoke options to overcome project-specific data challenges,” says Mike James, Moveout’s Business Development Manager. “In this instance, we were able to use the software to extract navigation data from previously processed SEG-Y gathers to create pseudo P1/90 navigation files. We then merged these with the corresponding SEG-D files.”
The resulting data was then reprocessed to reduce noise and ghosting creating new full and angle-stack volumes. “Summit used this data to further define an existing prospect, and is now planning to proceed to drilling it,” says Richard Inwards, Summit’s data manager. “There is no doubt that asking Moveout Data to remaster old surveys was a wise choice – it saved considerable time and expense and provided us with data we could use to make key exploration decisions.”