PARIS -- CGG, its technology partner, and Ardiseis, subsidiary of the Arabian Geophysical and Surveying Company (ARGAS), the Middle East’s seismic acquisition specialist, have announced the successful completion of the world’s highest-density broadband seismic survey ever acquired onshore or offshore. The ultra-high density of the data recorded on the West-Kalabsha survey on behalf of Apache Corp. (Apache) heralds a step-change in the quality of seismic that can be economically acquired in Egypt’s Western Desert and a quantum leap in imaging for the Middle East and North Africa region.
Apache set Ardiseis the ambitious challenge of delivering reservoir characterization-ready broadband seismic data from a 2,000-km2, ultra-dense survey, representing 72 million traces per km2, two-to-three times denser than any survey acquired to date worldwide. To achieve the ultra-high productivity acquisition required to produce the data at a comparable pace and cost to conventional land acquisition, Ardiseis deployed CGG’s proprietary Unconstrained Blended Acquisition technology for the first time in Egypt. This technique optimizes field operations to the extreme, with a large fleet of vibrators operating simultaneously and independently from each other non-stop. CGG successfully deblended the data by running its proprietary sophisticated deblending algorithm on its massive computing resources. In addition, Ardiseis used CGG’s broadband suite of technologies, CleanSweep and EmphaSeis, to acquire the required low-frequency-rich broadband data (starting from 1.5Hz), which is free of the harmonic noise contamination that has so far hindered industry adoption of true broadband high-productivity Vibroseis acquisition.