Pre-stack projects, completed in the cloud, are a highly beneficial, cost efficient and timely licence work programme activity, especially when other budgets items are postponed.
Even though lower oil prices are slowing general exploration activity, E&P companies still need to honour their licence commitments and progress seismic work programmes during the downturn – but new seismic purchases or full-scale reprocessing projects are unlikely to be sanctioned when budget cuts are the norm. However, by undertaking in-house reprocessing and seismic inversion on existing data, operators can mature prospects and optimise drilling locations. These activities will be looked on favourably by governments – but to do this, they will need to squeeze everything out of existing data libraries.
Seismic-to-well calibration for entire gather or any individual angle stack.
In markets such as Norway with large public data stores, considerable amounts of legacy seismic data exist and pre-stack projects could be a highly beneficial, cost efficient and timely licence work programme activity while other budgets items are postponed. Working with pre-stack seismic data is advantageous as it allows the interpreter to access the full dataset and improve the quality of data before undertaking stacking. It also helps to simplify and accelerate amplitude interpretation.
For many years, the size of the datasets was a major obstacle to making full use of pre-stack data. However, with the increase in computer power and the advent of big data computer analysis techniques we have seen in recent years, plus major increases in storage abilities, pre-stack data is now an available source of information to all interpreters, allowing them to extract fresh insights from existing data libraries in a low-cost workstream. Users are able to visualise the data on their desktops and generate the exact stacks and attributes needed to target promising anomalies, adjusting any parameter to see the desired results in seconds.
Upfront Costs Reduced for Cloud-based Pre-Stack Projects
In the present situation, with offices closed and the majority of people in the industry either furloughed or working from home, many companies are trying to ensure their personnel can still work effectively and be ready when the world finally returns to some semblance of normality. That includes ensuring that they have access to the software that they need to undertake routine tasks – including the interpretation of pre-stack seismic data.
Norway-based company Sharp Reflections, which specialises in pre-stack data analysis, has acknowledged these changing circumstances by reducing the upfront fee for cloud access to its flagship Pre-Stack Pro software by 80%. Not only does this support users who need to work from home at this time by providing them with access to the software from any computer and location, it also facilitates and encourages remote collaboration, both within companies and between license partners. By shifting to usage-based cloud pricing, this move makes the pre-pay model affordable at a time when costs are naturally being looked at closely. Since the solution is in the cloud, there is no longer any need for users to worry about which hardware is most compatible. Users who enroll in the pre-pay plan will save 40%-50% on monthly invoices, as compared with pay-as-you-go rates.
Pre-Stack Pro combines pre-stack visualisation, processing, and interpretation in one powerful platform though which it is possible to QC data, improve data quality, and generate the exact stacks and attributes needed to target promising anomalies, using 100% of the available seismic data.
