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Industry at a crossroads

A message from the geophysical industry

Corresponding author: chipgill@airmail.net

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

In the early days of the seismic industry, services were provided by a wide range of providers, from E&P company crews and vessels to a large number of localized operators of variable quality. The industry has matured over the last few decades and is now a much more ordered business—still including both local and regional service companies as well as major, global players.

Today, the geophysical industry faces many challenges: the consolidation of our customer base, the drive by our customers to commoditize seismic services; the exertion of market power in an attempt to shift risks to the seismic service provider; the denial or the ignoring of nonexclusive data ownership rights; moving standards for expectation of safety performance; the need to meet rapidly changing and increasingly onerous environmental practices, to name only a few. The geophysical industry has not successfully addressed many of these challenges and now faces perhaps its biggest challenge of all: bringing financial health back to the industry. Its failure to do so would be painful—both to those providing and to those utilizing the industry's products and services.

The International Association of Geophysical Contractors (IAGC) is the international trade association that represents those providing geophysical services and products around the world, and the organization reflects this maturing process. The IAGC has long enjoyed an established leadership role in raising HSE and operational standards and supporting best practice for both proprietary and nonexclusive business. It now has a necessary and emerging role in addressing the broad commercial issues facing the geophysical industry.

One thing is clear: 3D seismic is still an important and valuable contributor to the overall E&P effort. We have illustrated this premise in Figure 1. For these purposes, we assume this premise is widely accepted and will therefore not elaborate further. In this article . . . [Full Text of this Article]