Geophysics Forum

Wouldn't the foreigners have to do 14 days quarantine? Right now, everyone has to undertake 14 days of managed isolation (at a hotel); following a few lapses there's also strict enforcement of two negative tests (day 3 and day 12, IIRC); quarantine is a more strict regime for those whop are symptom...

And the offshore drillers are in big trouble too: "This month, the number of floating rigs at work is expected to hit the lowest level since 1986 as oil companies cancel or defer contracts, said industry executives and analysts." https://uk-mobile-reuters-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/uk.mobile.reuters...

Polarcus seems to follow the fate of Dubai where its headquarters is. They both rise and fall on the oil price I suspect; while Dubai's not a bit producer/exporter there are plenty of businesses (and ex-pats) there servicing the oil industry in the surrounding nations. Not a cheap place to operate ...

Ah - some detail here on the US E+P industry and how it has been performing financially over the last 10 years. Not very pretty: https://www.capriole-llc.com/news/2020/4/20/qt22aqcei7jqbyb7nnhci6xugx961v The oil price war with Russia/KSA took things to the edge of the cliff, and COVID-19 may have pu...

https://www.offshore-energy.biz/polarcus-restructures-with-20-headcount-reduction/ Shame - more pain for the sector. Not clear how many boats they have running. This might impact on DUG as well, as DUG provide their processing and onboard processing technology. https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/d...

The ShaleProfile blog shows the peak of US unconventional production in November 2019 as 8.1 million bbl/day. Total US oil production in November 2019 is given by the EIA as 12.9 million bbl/day Global oil production in November 2019 was 81.5 million bbl/day. That means at the peak US unconventional...

I joined the geophysics industry in 1992 and this decent from the 2013-14 "high" has been similar I suspect to the "flat period" when I was hired on. It was a good 8-10 years with oil prices below US$40 where we bumbled along with good years and bad, and companies coming in and out of debt crises; t...

Crude oil price is close to $40 now. I am optimistic. Suspect it needs to be sustained >$55 before you get break-even right along the supply chain if you include servicing debt. And it's that whole supply chain that is key - cutting costs by making your contractors work below their breakeven is jus...

There's a desperate need for oil companies to cut costs, especially those that have significant debt obligations. The reduction in cashflow is a real problem when those debt payments come up, and the US oil industry has done well out of cheap borrowing. There's wider concerns out their too. A lot of...

High resolution tends to be first and foremost about the frequencies used. You get higher vertical resolution of course, but higher frequencies maker for smaller fresnel zones and so better horizontal resolution as well. For that to be effective you also need smaller CDP bin sizes, so you end up wit...

is the second one "uh-oh, another boom-bust exploration cycle, sorry kids but we have to move again"?

Nods. Given the variations and stuff-ups you get in seismic files (SEGD, SEGY) its not a surprise. A fair chunk of software support questions when I was in the seismic processing software business were about bad formats. We had a bunch of tools to help people deal with it but sooner or later you nee...

1) Travel time
2) bulk shift
3) Plane wave
??

The potential in the US is much wider than that : https://www.nrel.gov/gis/assets/images/geothermal-identified-hydrothermal-and-egs.jpg Direct heat use is one of the key things; in that context you are looking for how deep the resources are where the heat is needed. That is I think where a lot of th...

Some of the work in the Netherlands for direct-heat geothermal (for glass houses) drew on oil exploration technology and teams - for example this project : http://geothermalresourcescouncil.blogspot.com/2018/04/netherlands-trias-westland-geothermal.html and the involvement of Amsterdam Petroleum Geo...

"The refraction method is easier in terms of data processing, especially when you don't have the computing power we have now. So it actually can be used first." Well, it was. Most modern systems for determining the LVL are going to use a full tomographic inversion that is calibrated by any uphole da...

Free air correction (gravity)
Modelling? (everything )
Wave propagation (mostly seismics)

Had to look those terms up:-) I think mostly you'll see FIR filters for the reasons you describe. While these do have edge effects compared to the physical IRR filter banks, the stability - especially with phase - is highly desirable. High computation cost doesn't mean very much these days, broadly ...

That tends to be in the nature of software, or maybe just processes. I think. In the first generation, expert users request functionality knowing full well its limitations. As people get brought onboard and trained so that mastery declines. Processes become dogma, basically. W Edwards Deming talks a...

Yes - the binning is more complex than the simple 2D case; that's why you need to examine the offsets (or offset vector tiles) to determine the best distribution (ie with the least holes) and/or use some kind of interpolation to fill in the gaps. Mostly people use interpolation schemes to regularise...

Can't think of a reason why that would be the case. Usually the issue is related to the offset distribution across CDPs, which is turn is a function of the SP spacing AND the CDP interval. So for example on a 2D marine line, if there's 2 CDP per shot, then one CDP will have channels 1,3,5,7,9... and...

I often hear geophysicists complain that geologists take their jobs, but not the other way around. Maybe geophysicists are really geeks and hate to see geologists doing their jobs with minimal understaning about math/physics behind it. :lol: Kind of; I think the geophysics has largely been pushed i...

The short answer is you don't. Or rather most pre-stack migrations function a lot better when the input dataset has been regularized and bin centred first, whether that's into common offset planes or offset-vector tiles. Holes and irregularities create artifacts that you have to handle in migration....

The latter means they are getting worried about servicing their debt, I suspect; normally contractors run up spec library data, as this creates an "asset" on the books that can be amortised (depreciated) over several years, spreading the cost. But the contractors all did that (to death) already from...

I think this is more of an "advertorial" than a news release - they sell this report (and others) annually to equipment suppliers. Of all of the marine seismic companies (which now excludes Schlumberger and CGG) PGS tend to do a fairly decent roundup of the state of the global marine (streamer) seis...