Expanding the application window for CSEM

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

When exploring for marine oil and gas resources, detailed remote mapping of the potential hydrocarbon accumulations is required before drilling. This is both because of the high costs related to offshore drilling but also due to environmental concerns. The recent emphasis on reducing production costs have led oil companies to focus on exploration in mature areas, targeting earlier overlooked smaller fields may be coupled to existing infrastructure. The small target size leads to higher requirements on the remote mapping capability. Furthermore, remaining resources may also be related to complicated structure which have caused these targets not to be discovered. The emerging focus on high-resolution subsurface mapping will be addressed in this project. CSEM is used to identify and image the high-resistive regions in the subsurface that are due to oil or gas accumulations. In this project we will research and develop tools that are suitable to delineate the smaller responses related to smaller hydrocarbon reservoirs that may also have a complex structure. Significant gains towards the goal of enhancing the technology for difficult targets are also expected from new methods to co-interpret different types of measurements and handling large data volumes more efficiently in high performance computing systems.