Singapore power play
  from: Offshore Engineer
  by: Jennifer Pallanich
  Friday, May 16, 2008

Opportunities masquerade as difficulties in the offshore oil and gas world, especially in frontier and emerging areas. Like the trash of one is the treasure of another, companies in the oil patch translate challenges into dollars. Jennifer Pallanich reports on how one seismic company tackles other companies’ problems.

Geophysical contractor CGGVeritas sees many reasons to get excited about the array of imaging difficulties near the company’s new Singapore office, which now serves as its Asia-Pacific headquarters.

‘We like geophysical problems,’ says Cameron Astill, CGGVeritas’ executive vice president for the Asia-Pacific region, noting that such challenges present the chance to improve on existing technologies. He talks about places like Vietnam and Australia’s North West Shelf when he starts listing hard-to-image reservoirs.

For instance, the fractured granite basements off Vietnam, he says, are found in one other location: Siberia. ‘That’s very difficult to image,’ Astill says, noting the granite is ‘noisy’, which makes it difficult to tell where the oil is since the wells need to be placed by the fractures.

Success came, he says, from using beam depth migration. Astill expects to see seismic activity increase off Vietnam as the country opens up additional acreage. ‘It’s not a huge market, but it’s a growing market, especially for processing with advanced technologies,’ he says.

Off Australia, along the North West Shelf, Astill notes difficulties the shallow carbonate layer presents in acquiring seismic. To address that challenge, CGGVeritas shot a multi-azimuth survey, which can image below carbonates as well as being applicable for subsalt regions and granitic multi-oriented high angle faults, he says. The multi-azimuth survey, which acquires sets of readings, allows processing of the sets of data to gain a better image of the layer. Astill says CGGVeritas has drawn heavily on the wide azimuth technology used in the Gulf of Mexico and has adapted it to new regions.

James Sun, the company’s Asia-Pacific region vice president for the R&D;processing product line, calls the Gulf of Mexico a test bed for new imaging technologies because of its difficult-toimage subsalt play.

Astill calls Indonesia, with its fractured carbonate reservoirs, ‘interesting’ to CGGVeritas. Activity off Indonesia ‘is picking up a lot lately,’ he adds.

Another area of activity is India, where a lot of 2D seismic is being shot offshore in association with bid rounds. Pakistan and New Zealand are other regional centers of seismic interest, adds Astill.

Anticipating substantial growth in the Asia-Pacific region, CGGVeritas backed that confidence with the recently opened US$55 million facility in Singapore.

The new Singapore regional HQ serves 25 countries, but according to Astill the busiest of those countries – India, Australia and Vietnam – bring in 65%-70% of the region’s work and revenues.

‘The whole region is really growing,’ he says, adding that he expects to see 15-20% growth in 2008 compared with the 2007 numbers. The company logged similar growth from 2006 to 2007 in the region.

The hub, which processes the seismic acquired in the region, also contains a visualisation room, due to open 2Q 2008 and featuring the latest HD rear projection technology. Astill notes the facility has room for 50% growth in storage, processing, people and power demand.

CGGVeritas is building up its R&D;efforts in Singapore with the aim, Sun says, of developing and/or adapting new technology that supports local activity. Two focal research areas revolve around controlled beam migration and reverse time migration (RTM).

Based on beam migration, CBM offers the additional benefit of enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio of the data. It is expected to be applicable when data with a poor signal-to-noise ratio is further masked by artifacts from the more traditional ray-based imaging algorithms.

RTM, seen as ‘the prize’ by Sun, is computation-intensive because it uses exact equations and therefore results in more precise processing.

In 2005, adds Sun, RTM was more of a dream because of the demands of computing.

‘RTM really doesn’t make any approximations for acoustic waves,’ he explains, comparing RTM to traditional imaging methods which employ highfrequency ray approximation or one-way approximation to the exact acoustic wave equation. ‘Things we could not see in the past, we can see [with RTM],’ Sun declares.

The upgraded Singapore location will support the RTM demand on computing resources with massive computer clusters equipped with the most advanced highspeed computer chips and switches available. Sun says the company’s Houston hub has already applied RTM to existing data. Singapore’s office has benefited some from its association with the Houston office, he adds, and the company offers RTM to clients out of the Singapore office.

‘That relationship with Houston has been beneficial,’ Sun says.

The goal is to offer controlled beam migration for a wide spectrum of geologic problems and also to be able to offer RTM to clients directly from the Singapore office, he adds.

Another technology, Sun says, is the amplitude tomography, which will read rock below shallow gas. The shallow gas induces anomalous amplitude decay beneath it due to the wave transmission effect. The source of this anomalous amplitude loss can be located through tomographic inversion and the anomalous decay can be compensated for subsequently. The Singapore office is applying this technology to several client datasets.

The new office serves as the regional marine acquisition headquarters, and as such handles the logistics associated with moving the vessels around the region for assignments and to avoid foul weather in the monsoon season.

‘Our vessels tend to move from India to the South China Sea and back again. That’s a typical cycle,’ explains Astill. Distance from shore makes quite a difference as the company carries out its crew changes, he adds.

‘Logistics is probably the biggest challenge,’ especially offshore India where the boats tend to work far from shore, he adds. Even so, availability of helicopters combined with a focus on HSE dictate a lot of logistics management. OE

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