Norwegian offshore seismic data company TGS has said that processing of the northern half of its landmark ocean-bottom node (OBN) multi-client Utsira survey in the Norwegian North Sea is complete and has been delivered to pre-funding customers.
Data processing will be complete for the southern half of Utsira in September 2020. Carried out with TGS' partner, Axxis Geo Solutions (AGS) the 1,584-square kilometer Utsira survey was completed in October 2019.
The total number of nodes deployed for the survey was 143,567 and total shots were 3,942,230. The size of the input data for the processing of the entire survey was 1.5 petabytes.
"To put the project into context, the data collected is equivalent to a typical 520,000-square kilometer marine survey - enough to cover an area the size of Spain," TGS said.
Kristian Johansen, CEO at TGS, stated: “TGS has been at the forefront of the recent commercial development of multi-client OBN technologies and the launch of our Utsira OBN data library is a further step forward in our efforts to grow this market over the next decade.
Our OBN data is defining a new reference point for quality subsurface imaging which will be imperative for E&P companies as they seek to maximize the life of producing fields and production facilities.”
TGS has said that OBN has proven to be the ultimate imaging tool to help operators overcome complex geological imaging challenges. With full azimuth and ultra-long offsets acquisition, complex geology can be illuminated in all directions and structures and attribute variations can be properly understood, TGS has said.
"Greater than ten times higher fold significantly improves the signal-to-noise ratio, as well as the ability to distinguish between structure and attribute anomalies. OBN is also the idea tool for characterization of fluids in a reservoir," TGS said.
