NOW READ OUR ARTICLES IN 40 DIFFERENT LANGUAGES.
HOME PAGE SUBSCRIPTIONS, Print Editions, Newsletter PRODUCTS READ THE PETROLEUM NEWS ARCHIVE! ADVERTISING INFORMATION EVENTS

Vol. 22, No. 47 Week of November 19, 2017
Providing coverage of Alaska and northern Canada's oil and gas industry

More prospects located

Click here to go directly to this story within the full PDF version of this issue, with any maps, photos or other artwork that appears in some of the articles.

Email it to an associate.

ConocoPhillips says new seismic technique reveals some new potential oil traps

Alan Bailey

Petroleum News

By using a new seismic survey technique ConocoPhillips has identified new untested potential oil traps on Alaska’s North Slope, Al Hirshberg, the company’s executive vice president for drilling and projects, commented during the company’s annual analyst and investor meeting on Nov. 8.

Matt Fox, ConocoPhillips executive vice president for exploration and technology, told the meeting that the company’s Willow discovery in the northeastern NPR-A had enabled the calibration of seismic techniques to specifically search for similar prospects.

“When we did that we could see a lot of follow up potential on the seismic structures and the sediments that look the same size as Willow, many of them right across that area,” Fox said.

ConocoPhillips has said that the Willow discovery, announced in January of this year, may hold 300 million barrels of recoverable oil. The discovery involves a subtle stratigraphic trap in the Nanushuk formation, a rock unit that has become associated with major new oil discoveries on the North Slope. A stratigraphic trap involves a situation where hydrocarbons become trapped underground because of rock strata geometry that results from the manner in which the strata were formed.

Fox cautioned that, with the involvement of stratigraphic traps, there is no guarantee that the new prospects actually hold oil.

“But every one of them we’ve drilled so far has had oil in it, so we’re hopeful that several of these Willow lookalikes will deliver additional production,” Fox said.

Compressive seismic imaging

The new seismic technique that ConocoPhillips is pioneering is called compressive seismic imaging, a technique which the company says it invented and which the company has patented. The company has been using the technique for about five years around the world, with demand for use of the method increasing as the company’s geoscientists have become aware of the technique’s capabilities, Hirshberg said.

In a conventional seismic survey, multiple seismic traces from multiple shots targeting the same subsurface region are stacked together, to amplify the sound echoes from subsurface rock structures while dampening out the background noise in the sound recordings. Apparently ConocoPhillips’ new technique involves the use of a sophisticated mathematical process to combine data from multiple seismic shots - similar mathematics are used in the medical field for the processing of magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, a technique used to create images of the internal structures of people’s bodies.

The mathematical processing of the seismic data reveals detail finer than the resolution achievable from conventional seismic techniques. There is a 10-fold increase in the definition and resolution that can be obtained from the same raw seismic data, Hirshberg said.



Did you find this article interesting?
Tweet it
TwitThis
Digg it
Digg

Submit it to another favorite Social Site or Article Directory.

del.icio.us Facebook Furl Mixx NewsVine Reddit StumbleUpon YahooMyWeb Google LinkedIn Live MySpace Sphinn Technorati Yahoo! Buzz
Print this story | Email it to an associate.






Petroleum News - Phone: 1-907 522-9469 - Fax: 1-907 522-9583
[email protected] --- http://www.petroleumnews.com ---
S U B S C R I B E

Copyright Petroleum Newspapers of Alaska, LLC (Petroleum News)(PNA)©2013 All rights reserved. The content of this article and web site may not be copied, replaced, distributed, published, displayed or transferred in any form or by any means except with the prior written permission of Petroleum Newspapers of Alaska, LLC (Petroleum News)(PNA). Copyright infringement is a violation of federal law subject to criminal and civil penalties.

This story has 43 lines. and it is 1573 pixels high.