Spectrum has commenced another major seismic reprocessing project offshore the East (Atlantic) Coast, USA. The project comprises 19,000 km of vintage 2D seismic data which was acquired before the leasing and drilling moratorium was implemented in the mid 1980’s.

The decision to reprocess such a large volume of data was made in response to the recent announcement by the Department of the Interior to begin the environmental analysis ahead of geological and geophysical activities offshore the eastern seaboard of the US. Subsequent to this announcement, the Obama administration stated on March 31st, that it is ending a moratorium on drilling for oil on the east coast of US from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida.

Spectrum has recently developed significant experience reprocessing nearly 30,000 km of vintage data from offshore the East Coast on a proprietary basis. A great deal of knowledge has been gained during these projects, helping to determine the optimum processing sequence to best handle imaging problems in this geologic province. This included developing a full set of support data in order to build correct geometry to merge the raw seismic data with the limited navigation data available.

A combined cascaded demultiple solution consisting of SRME (Surface Related Multiple Elimination) and Radon demonstrates significant improvement in data fidelity over prior pre-processing which either had no demultiple technique applied or a very basic FK (frequency wave-number) demultiple. Spectrum’s proprietary amplitude preserving model building and imaging workflow facilitates the retention of true amplitude AVO (amplitude variations with offset) response, resulting in imaged sections showing significant improvement over the vintage stacked data displays.

Executive Vice President of Data Processing, Andy Cuttell, stated “The application of an innovative processing sequence combined with Spectrum’s contemporary seismic processing techniques and extensive experience in the region will ensure a high quality final product on all our US East Coast projects both proprietary and Multi-Client”

Tags: Spectrum ASA