TGS has announced that the processing of the northern half of its landmark ocean-bottom node (OBN) multi-client survey in the Norwegian North Sea is complete.
“This is the biggest OBN survey on the Norwegian continental shelf ever, and also the world’s biggest-ever multi-client OBN survey”, according to TGS (GEO magazine 06/2019: “The ultimate survey”).
The multi-client study has been delivered to pre-funding customers. According to TGS, data processing will be complete for the southern half of Utsira in September 2020.
The 1,584 km3 Utsira survey was completed in October 2019 and was undertaken with partner, Axxis Geo Solutions (AGS). The total number of nodes deployed for the survey was 143,567 and total shots were 3,942,230.
The size of the input data for the processing of the entire survey was 1.5 petabytes (1015 bytes or one million gigabytes).
TGS note that the project itself is equivalent to a typical 520,000 km3 marine survey – enough to cover an area the size of Spain.
According to TGS, OBN has proven to be the ultimate imaging tool to help operators overcome complex geological imaging challenges. With full azimuth and ultra-long offsets acquisition, complex geology can be illuminated in all directions and structures and attribute variations can be properly understood.
Kristian Johansen, CEO at TGS, stated that: “[…] the launch of our Utsira OBN data library is a further step forward in our efforts to grow this market over the next decade.”
