BP Seismic Tech Attempts Entry to Global Markets

Supported by the success of seismic imaging that found an extra billion barrels at the Gulf of Mexico, BP is now trying to take its latest technology to Angola and Brazil.

The software used in the Gulf, based on an algorithm created by Xukai Shen, a geophysicist straight out of Stanford University, led to BP discovering the crude in an area where it had long thought there was none to be found.

Industry experts said that the scale of the discovery 8 km below BP’s Thunder Horse field, announced last week, marked a major leap forward for deepwater exploration – a costly business known for its low success rate and high risk. It is an example of how technology is helping deepwater make a comeback after a decade when the industry has concentrated on advances in onshore shale.

 The new deposit was found with software known as Full Waveform Inversion (FWI), which is run on a super-computer and analyses reverberations of seismic soundwaves to produce high-resolution 3D images of ancient layers of rock that lie thousands of meters under the sea bed, helping geologists to locate oil and gas.

It is more accurate than previous surveying methods, BP said, and processes data in a matter of days, compared with months or years before.

While the discovery marked the largest industry success for digital seismic imaging, the British oil major’s rivals are working hard with similar techniques.

BP scientist John Etgen, who is the company’s top advisor on seismic imaging, said that it aimed to retain its edge with a new machine that it has developed, which is the Wolfspar, to be used alongside FWI.

The Wolfspar, which looks similar to a submarine, is pulled by a ship through the ocean and emits very low frequency soundwaves, which are particularly effective for penetrating thick salt layers that lie above rocks containing fossil fuels, he added.

Etgen said that BP planned to roll out Wolfspar alongside FWI during the second half of this year at the Atlantis field in the Gulf of Mexico, where a large salt layer lays that still hides part of the site. The company is planning to expand the use of the technology to other big oil and gas basins, including Brazil next year and Angola at a later stage, he said.

“Seeing through very complex, very distorted salt bodies was the hardest problem we had, the most challenging,” said the Houston-based scientist during an interview.

In both Brazil and Angola, oil deposits are locked under thick salt layers. Brazil’s deepwater oil fields comprise one of the world’s fastest-growing basins in terms of production. BP last year signed a partnership with Brazil’s national oil company Petrobras to develop resources there.

Oil finds that amount to billion barrels are quite rare, especially in mature basins like the Gulf of Mexico. However, the scale of output from deepwater wells means they can compete with the most low-cost basins in theworld, in particular US shale.

BP is far from alone in focusing on technology; all huge oil companies have put a growing emphasis on digitalization to diminish costs following the oil price collapse of 2014.

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