See more from this Division: Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies
See more from this Session: Advances in Seismic Imaging—Impact on Exploration through Production: Case Studies
Abstract:
The Mad Dog field is located approximately 140 miles south of the Louisiana coastline in the southern Green Canyon area in water depths between 4100 feet to 6000 feet. The complex salt canopy overlying a large portion of the field results in generally poor seismic data quality on narrow azimuth seismic data. Advanced processing techniques improved the image, but gaps still remained even after several years of technology development and application effort. We concluded that wide azimuth acquisition was required to illuminate the field in a new way and conducted the industry's first at-scale Wide Azimuth Towed Streamer (WATS) survey over Mad Dog in 2004/2005. The initial results provided significant enhancement over the narrow azimuth data, immediately impacting well decisions. Subsequent reprocessing using new and emerging wide azimuth techniques and a complete rebuild of the salt velocity model provided further enhancements in data quality with the products being fully utilised in subsurface decisions on the field. The need to mitigate business risks in highly material subsalt plays led BP to explore the technical limits of the seismic method, testing novel acquisition techniques to improve illumination and signal to noise ratio. These were successful in illuminating previously hidden parts of the field.
See more from this Division: Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies
See more from this Session: Advances in Seismic Imaging—Impact on Exploration through Production: Case Studies