Business News for the week of 13 February 2012 News section front Past news briefs Seismic crew survey reports

EMGS launches new Barents Sea multiclient 3D EM campaign

13 February 2012—Electromagnetic Geoservices ASA (EMGS) has secured prefunding to start a multiclient 3D EM campaign in the Barents Sea, ahead of Norway's 22nd exploration licensing round. Data acquisition will commence in March using the vessel Atlantic Guardian.

Preliminary data deliverables will be available from April 2012 and 3D inverted data will be available from May 2012.

 

ION expands BrasilSPAN regional seismic program

13 February 2012—ION Geophysical Corporation announced that its GeoVentures group has added an additional 8000 km of regional seismic data to its Greater BrasilSPAN program in the Equatorial Margin offshore northern and northeastern Brazil. This new data will be processed by ION's GX Technology data processing group and adds to the approximately 17,600 km of data the company acquired in the region in 2009 and brings the total number of kilometers in the company's BrasilSPAN portfolio to over 50,000.

 

Golden Software presents Strater 3 with maps and true automatic cross sections

14 February 2012—Golden Software has released Strater 3, an upgrade to Strater, a well log, borehole and cross-section plotting software package for geoscientists. Strater 3 enables users to create professional well logs, cross sections and location maps from interval, depth, and well data. 
Two new features in Strater 3 are the ability to create a map and automatically create true cross sections. Users can create maps to view their borehole locations in plan view, add base layers such as SHP and DXF files or georeferenced aerial imagery, insert the maps into their log or cross-section display for presentations and reports, and connect boreholes together within the map into a section line. Once boreholes are connected, a cross section can be created with one click. Cross sections can be fully customized and edited, including reshaping contacts, adding well headers, selecting which layers to visualize, hanging the cross section on a selected reference datum such as mean sea level or a marker bed, and exporting the cross section into Voxler 3 for true 3D visualization.



Strater 3 supports 14 popular log types to graphically display subsurface data. In addition to the new tadpole and function logs added in Strater 3, users can also create bar, zone bar, percentage, graphic, well construction, lithology, post, classed post, complex text, line/symbol, crossplot, and depth logs. Strater 3 offers a multitude of new options, including full Unicode font support for international compatibility, a 64-bit installation option for increased memory handling in 64-bit versions of Windows, batch exporting of multiple logs, and exporting of logs to LAS files. One other very powerful addition to Strater is the ability to convert and display data in either measured depth or true vertical depth. Users can specify or load azimuth and inclination data for their boreholes, and choose between five different calculation methods. Strater 3 supports any Windows-compatible printer or plotter and also allows batch printing and batch exporting. A borehole design may be created and automatically printed or exported with data from multiple boreholes. Logs, maps and cross sections may also be copied and pasted into other programs, or exported in one of the many supported file formats such as EMF, EPS, PDF, JPG, BMP, or TIF for insertion into presentations or reports.

 

Avizo software chosen by Louisiana State University for multidisciplinary 3D imaging class

14 February 2012—Visualization Sciences Group (VSG) announced an agreement with Louisiana State University for the licensing of Avizo 3D analysis software for use in the honors multidisciplinary 3D imaging class. This agreement supports LSU's strategy of teaching science with visualization software and providing students with the means to solve complex scientific problems using 3D imaging and data visualization. Under the agreement, the entire Avizo software portfolio—with heavy emphasis on its Fire edition—is made available to students and professors of the multidisciplinary 3D imaging class through a token-based licensing model.

 

TGS announces a third 3D multiclient seismic survey offshore northwest Australia

16 February 2012—TGS has commenced acquisition of a 3D multiclient seismic survey in the Outer Exmouth Plateau area. The new survey, Gnaraloo, covers 2093 km2 over parts of blocks WA-347-P, WA-348-P, and neighboring open acreage to the north of the Mary Rose Northeast 3D multiclient survey, previously announced in December 2011. The Gnaraloo survey ties in with existing modern 3D coverage in the area. Upon completion of the Gnaraloo survey, the TGS portfolio of 3D multiclient coverage in this highly prospective area offshore Australia will exceed 14,000 km2.
The seismic data is being acquired by the M/V Geo Atlantic and is expected to be complete during early 2012 with final data available in late 2012.

 

New QI company enters the market

A new geophysical company, Qeye Labs, has entered the market. It will focus on delivering quantitative interpretation solutions (QI) based on their proprietary and newly developed software. Qeye Labs was founded by Klaus Bolding Rasmussen, Henrik Juhl Hansen, Frederik Horn, Ask Jakobsen, and Anders Bruun. The company is based in Copenhagen but operates globally.