You are all probably familiar with the phrase “A Perfect Storm” referring to the simultaneous occurrence of events which, taken individually, would be far less powerful than the result of their chance combination. Although a bit of a cliché, this phrase best describes our seabed offering – the unique and timely combination of ION’s vision, the right team, right partner, best-in-class technologies, and a customized approach.
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A year and a half ago, the Seabed Solutions business unit was created with a solid vision to transform our innovative hardware platform – VectorSeis® Ocean (VSO) – into an integrated full-wave seabed solution to address our E&P clients’ most difficult seabed imaging challenges. The responsibility for bringing this vision to life was given to ION’s Seabed Solutions team. Tim Rigsby, a recognized expert in ocean-bottom cable (OBC) operations, was appointed Sr. VP of Seabed Solutions in late 2006 and tasked with building an elite OBC team. A core group of individuals having more than 100 years of combined experience in complex OBC operations in places like Prudhoe Bay, Alaska and offshore Mexico, India, and ADMA are now in place. |
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Having formed the team, the next step was to define an approach that set ION apart from our competitors: a collaborative ‘image-driven’ approach, an acquisition partnership, and best-in-class technologies. Taking a sheet from the GX Technology playbook, the Seabed Solutions business model is to work backwards from our clients’ imaging and interpretation objectives to identify the most effective technologies and services for each project. Leveraging our clients’ regional and reservoir knowledge, feasibility studies allow us to thoroughly evaluate the nature of the challenge. With this insight, a survey is then designed to balance our clients’ geophysical, budgetary and HSE goals. Data acquisition is provided via RXT, our exclusive VSO partner, allowing the Seabed Solutions team to stay focused on optimizing the entire project by taking a perspective that is larger than just field operations. And last but not least, we tapped into our best-in-class portfolio of in-house technologies -- including Gator command & control software, MESA survey design software, and GXT data processing services -- to differentiate our offering from other seabed players. With the team, offering, and approach in place, we have been hard at work meeting with oil & gas clients to better understand their most difficult geophysical challenges and collaborate with them on acquiring high-value seabed surveys.
But this isn’t all we are focused on. Using our collective past experience and lessons learned from recent projects, we are providing feedback to our Marine Imaging Systems group, our GXT imaging solutions colleagues, and our acquisition partner RXT to enable our oil & gas company clients to extract the maximum value from their full-wave data. We are also working to expand our offering in the 4D permanent reservoir monitoring segment. ION is a one of three initial partners in a JV called Octio. In addition to ION developing the recording equipment, which is based on the VSO platform, we are assisting Octio in crafting their own total solution offering by adding ION-provided feasibility studies, data processing, and reservoir analysis to the partnership’s end-to-end toolkit.
With this ‘perfect storm,’ ION has crafted an advantaged offering in the seabed imaging game. And that’s just the beginning – we look forward to building on that offering in the future.
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