Seismic hybridly!

The first commercial seismic acquisition combined streamer and OBN, Quad 35, Norway.

In this project, I worked as a technician for the contract technical review, onboard acquisition, data QC & reprocessing, and follow-up work. I got the best commendation from the client for modeling this novel acquisition to make it more efficient and understandable.

The operation

Q35 project was carried out from July to September 2020 offshore Bergen, which is the first hybrid seismic acquisition combined streamers and nodes. The simultaneous acquisition makes Q35 being able to fulfill the Ultra high-density(UHD) data from streamer and FWI capacity from sparse node with a competitive price.

Have seen so many magic skies onboard. Photos by Zhihao. Figure from seismicpartner.com
Vermeer(2002) mentioned this novel idea in his book. However, there are combination undershooting cases and standalone sparse node cases, but no simultaneous case until the Q35.

The advantages

A tight and efficient configuration is well displayed by drone view. Photo by Zhihao.

Wide-towed sources and narrow streamer separation:

  • to make UHD dataset.
  • to get more near-offset sampling, and better supporting AVO.
  • a more evenly-spread-shots makes streamer + node achievable.

Node deployment: overall sparse but dense on the sweet spot:

  • FWI.
  • Wide azimuth, Low frequency, high S/Nā€¦

The future is not streamer vs node.

UHD Streamer + Sparse node is the future. More sources and even wider towing will significantly benefit hybrid acquisition.

(left) More streamers? No, I prefer more wide-towed sources. (right) The shot point distribution will be no gaps if using quad-sources. Plot by Offshoreorient studio.