UK-based Geotrace has been awarded a prestigious contract
for the processing of Statoil’s benchmark ‘Q’ survey over the Visund field,
Norway. WesternGeco will be shooting the survey using its proprietary Q-Marine
technology, with ten 5,000 meter cables in a 675 meter swath. Western-Geco’s
Q technology uses single sensor acquisition to record extremely high resolution
data. 640 km. sq. Geotrace is also to re-process and merge two previous data
sets along with the new survey. The survey is part of Statoil’s plans to optimize
existing fields and the goal of the survey program is to identify where Statoil
should drill to tap additional reserves, and to map existing discoveries in
order to ensure profitable tail production. Baseline The 640 square kilometer survey will also establish a baseline
for future monitoring of fluid movement in the reservoir. The Visund 4D processing
was awarded to Geotrace based on its previous processing and capabilities in
the field of time-lapse technology. Unlike more conventional 4D targets, the
Visund field is well into its production cycle. The license holders Statoil,
Norsk Hydro, Petoro, Conoco-Phillips and TFE are to use the time lapse data
to ‘monitor changes of physical parameters within the field.’ This article originally appeared in Oil IT Journal 2004 Issue # 7. For more information or to comment on this topic email here.