In November 2005, ION changed the game in seismic imaging with the introduction of FireFly, the world's first cableless system for full-wave land acquisition. FireFly is purpose-designed to deliver key benefits to both E&P companies and seismic acquisition contractors. These benefits include:
Reduced System Weight
On today's standard seismic survey, cables and miscellaneous ground equipment weigh 25 tons or more. Because weight directly contributes to the costs of transporting gear and mobilizing a seismic crew, the cables themselves increase the cost of acquisition. FireFly was designed to eliminate much of the excess weight associated with cables that can account for up to 20% of the operational cost of a "typical" survey onshore in North America.
Improved Operational Efficiency
Deploying, rolling, troubleshooting and repairing a cable-based system is a manpower-intensive operation. It is estimated that 25-50% of the individuals tasked with spread deployment and retrieval are involved in cable-based activity, while 50-75% of troubleshooting personnel are focused on cable problems. By eliminating cables, FireFly will reduce manpower and logistics intensity compared to conventional seismic operations.
Reduced Health, Safety, and Environmental (HSE) Risks
By removing heavy cables and reducing manpower intensity during acquisition operations, FireFly offers a land system with much less health and safety risk to field crews. Additionally, the removal of cables and smaller spread footprint dramatically reduces the risk of damage to sensitive environmental areas.
Improved System Availability
Up to 50% of operational time is spent on cable troubleshooting, meaning only 50% of the average crew's day spent on actual acquisition. With conventional acquisition systems, uptime is further reduced as the number of stations increase because of the increased risk for line failures and the time-consuming, sequential, trial-and-error approaches for troubleshooting. As a single-station system, FireFly overcomes these cable-based limitations and delivers productivity improvements that actually increase as station counts increase.
ImprovED Illumination by Fully Sampling the Subsurface
Cable-based architectures impose constraints on how surveys are designed. For instance, sensors are required to be spaced in gridded geometries that prevent surveys from being tailored to unique surface, near-surface and subsurface challenges. Many geophysicists see the ideal survey design as having upwards of 50,000 stations, a goal made operationally impractical by cable-based systems. FireFly imposes no such constraints, taking the industry one step closer in its quest to obtaining fully sampled data from the subsurface.
In 2006 ION partnered with BP and Apache to launch FireFly. BP conducted an 8,000+ station trial at its Wamsutter gas field in Wyoming, while Apache deployed a similar sized system to acquire full-wave data in East Texas. Both datasets have been processed by our GXT Imaging Solutions group and interpreters are now using FireFly insights to tune their reservoir development plans.
In addition, E&P companies and seismic acquisition contractors can experience what the full-wave, full sampling era of seismic is like with Scorpion, ION's cable-based land acquisition platform.
For even more comprehensive information about FireFly, visit the FireFly community webpage.
