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The Leading Edge; August 2002; v. 21; no. 8; p. 791-794; DOI: 10.1190/1.1503189
© 2002 Society of Exploration Geophysicists
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Wide-azimuth marine acquisition by the helix method

Dwight V. Sukup

ChevronTexaco, Houston, Texas

Corresponding author: sukupdv@ChevronTexaco.com

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

In many areas of the Gulf of Mexico, irregular salt bodies cover vast regions of hydrocarbon-producing sediments. Conventional "narrow-azimuth" seismic acquisition surveys in many cases have not been able to sufficiently illuminate the subsalt structures that trap these hydrocarbons. Even state-of-the-art imaging techniques cannot overcome the lack of illumination on these structures to properly image them. The basic problem, as Figure 1 illustrates, is the inherent 2D nature of conventional streamer acquisition. A seismic vessel towing several streamers is only able to record a narrow swath of the wavefield reflected back from the subsurface geology. This frequently means in cases involving complex overburdens (such as irregularly shaped salt bodies that have seismic shadow zones beneath them) an inability to interpret the geology.


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  		Figure 1. Inherent 2D nature of streamer acquisition geometry.

 
The SMAART JV (a joint venture which includes BP, BHP, and ChevronTexaco) has undertaken a study of various marine acquisition techniques over a typical Gulf of Mexico salt model to help understand which methods best illuminate subsalt structures and which imaging techniques best image these subsalt structures. In all cases, the studies indicate that "wide-azimuth" acquisition methods are superior to narrow-azimuth methods in illuminating structures beneath complex salt bodies. This, of course, makes sense because wide-azimuth acquisition allows the target to be illuminated from many directions instead of from a single direction. The vertical cable method developed at Texaco is one technique that showed superior results in illuminating the subsalt structures of this salt model. However it may not be practical (or even feasible) to use vertical cable acquisition in many deepwater areas. This leads to an interesting question—can similar wide-azimuth coverage be obtained using conventional streamer technology?

Texaco developed a vertical-cable acquisition and processing strategy during the late 1980s and early 1990s to overcome the narrow-azimuth nature of conventional marine . . . [Full Text of this Article]






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