Business news for the week of 5 December 2011 News section front Past news briefs Seismic crew survey reports

Dolphin awarded 6 months work for new 3D seismic vessel

5 December 2011—Dolphin Geophysical has accepted a letter of award from TGS-NOPEC Geophysical Company ASA for a six-months charter of the new high-capacity 3D seismic vessel, M/V Polar Duchess. The contract is expected to begin during first half of April and continue through a full 2012-summer season in Europe.

 

Barclays Corporate Oil and Gas Team announces involvement in multi-million dollar deals

5 December 2011—Barclays Corporate oil and gas team has been involved in deals providing funding for acquisitions and E&P amounting to almost US $415million since September this year.

The facilities have been provided for companies working in the North Sea and in the Americas and comprise of reserve based lending for E&P activities in the United Kingdom Continental Shelf, including the purchase of assets, letters of credit for decommissioning and corporate working capital facilities for an acquisition across the Atlantic.

One deal saw international oilfield services company Reservoir Group acquire GeoSearch Logging, Inc, one of the largest geological and hydrocarbon well logging service companies in the United States.

Headquartered in Oklahoma, GeoSearch works with operators providing geological consulting services, vertical and horizontal well logs, instrumentation, digital cuttings photography and CO₂ monitoring. This was the fifth acquisition by the Group this year.

 

TGS signs additional letter of intent for 3D Vessel

6 December 2011—TGS has signed a letter of intent with Polarcus to charter the 12 streamer new build vessel, M/V Polarcus Amani, for 3D multiclient projects in Europe during the 2012 summer season. The charter will begin in mid-April and last for approximately five months. 

The details of the individual projects to be completed under this charter will be announced separately.

 

Blueback Reservoir announces the release of the Blueback Toolbox v11

12 December 2011—Blueback Reservoir released the Blueback Toolbox v11. The Blueback Toolbox suite of Petrel plug-ins contains Petrel functionality features not available in standard Petrel. The Blueback Toolbox suite now contains 5 different modules: Geology Toolbox, Geophysics Toolbox, Project Management Toolbox, Reservoir Engineering Toolbox, and the new Seismic Reservoir Characterization Toolbox.

The Blueback Seismic Reservoir Characterization Toolboxdelivers geophysics tools to assist in reservoir characterization. The current content focuses on estimating seismic net pay for thinbedded reservoirs and classification of seismic data using AVO analysis to help identify hydrocarbons.

The functionality ranges from the seismic net pay workflow, as presented by Connelly (2007), AVO seismic classification and functionality for creating connected volumes of your extracted seismic attribute bodies. The Seismic net pay workflow involves a series of steps from analyzing the AI GI gradient, through colored inversion and the creation of seismic net pay maps.

The five modules are integrated with Petrel with the same Petrel user interface and can be downloaded on the Schlumberger Ocean Store.

 

TGS commences multiclient 3D wide azimuth survey in Gulf of Mexico

12 December 2011—TGS has commenced acquisition of a 3D multiclient wide azimuth (WAZ) survey covering 11,655 km² in the Gulf of Mexico in partnership with WesternGeco.

The survey, Patriot WAZ 3D, will be the first orthogonal WAZ survey covering a large portion of the existing Freedom WAZ data set. Following the acquisition of Patriot WAZ the data will be combined with Freedom WAZ and the resulting image will provide the industry with an additional level of subsurface clarity.  Upon completion of Patriot, the TGS portfolio of WAZ coverage will exceed 39,000km².

The new seismic data is being acquired by a four-vessel WAZ fleet. The data will be processed by TGS and preliminary products will be available to participating companies in 2013 with a final processed product expected by early 2014. 

 

European patent office rules in favor of EMGS

13 December 2011—The Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office in Munich has found that EMGS's patent for the use of CSEM for the direct detection of hydrocarbons in submarine reservoirs is valid. The patent (EP 1256019) was the subject of an opposition in the European Patent Office, but has successfully overcome that opposition at the final appeal level.