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Basin Exploration Case Study: Offshore West Africa

Enhance Economics of Exploration and Reservoir Development

Exploration and development in the waters offshore West Africa has been challenging.  Legacy seismic datasets were not designed to deliver a holistic understanding of the petroleum systems along the West African margin. With numerous intersecting faults and compartments, reservoirs in the region can be structurally complex. In some countries, pressures to use indigenous oil field services firms are intense and often mandated within development agreements. To improve the understanding of the crustal architecture of the region, several of Africa’s largest E&P operators planned multi-year, multi-billion dollar exploration and reservoir development programs with the goal to identify new reservoirs, and to optimize reservoir management plans for previously discovered fields.

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Imaging Deep Within the Basin Architecture

ION was engaged to deliver a series of integrated seismic programs. Our approach began with a basin-scale imaging program designed to image deep within the crustal architecture offshore Angola. Known as CongoSPAN, the insights delivered by this program resulted in a series of programs extending from the Cameroon volcanic line to the Gulf of Guinea. Recently, a major international oil company commissioned a multi-year ocean bottom cable program using VectorSeis Ocean (VSO) and awarded our GX Technology group a data processing contract for both p-wave and converted wave (c-wave) imaging. The goals of the program are to eliminate seabed multiple problems and improve the bandwidth of the recorded seismic, enabling them to ’see through’ gas clouds.

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Improved Petroleum System Understanding

Numerous insights into the region’s depositional and tectonic history have been obtained, including the identification of underexplored petroleum systems further offshore and in deeper parts of the geologic section. Our geophysicists and regional petroleum geologists have begun to correlate the conjugate ties between West Africa and Brazil using our BrasilSPAN data. The improved bandwidth made possible by the VectorSeis sensor provides higher resolution images of potential reservoir targets. Deployment on the seabed has shown to reduce the problems often caused by seismic multiples, while the 4C data appears to be minimizing the signal attenuation that is normally caused by gas clouds.

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