Business news for the week of 29 August 2008

Past news briefs

EMGS awarded shallow-water contract in Malaysia
13 August 2008—Electromagnetic Geoservices was awarded a contract worth more than US$5 million by a repeat customer in Malaysia. The work has commenced and EMGS is using new technology in water depths of approximately 60 m.

Spectrum appointment directs new R&D roadmap
20 August 2008—Ron Silva has joined seismic services group Spectrum as group technical manager. Operating from the company's head office in Woking, United Kingdom, he will direct new research and contribute to the development of new software technology for the company.

GMI launches GMI PressCheck software
20 August 2008—GeoMechanics International announced the commercial release of GMI PressCheck, a software package to predict pore pressure as well as fracture gradient. GMI PressCheck includes tools for rapid import, manipulation, and a combination of wireline logging data. GMI PressCheck allows the user to smooth and filter logs as well as perform numerous calculations based on the logs.

NVIDIA CUDA 2.0 released to production
22 August 2008—NVIDIA announced the production release of CUDA 2.0, the latest version of its C language programming environment for GPUs that enables software developers to tap into the parallel architecture of the GPU for the acceleration of complex computational problems.
 
This latest production release of the CUDA software suite includes support for 32- and 64-bit Windows Vista and Mac OS X as well as 3D textures and hardware interpolation for medical volume reconstruction and oil and gas seismic computing.
 
Also included in CUDA 2.0 is an Adobe Photoshop plug-in example for both PC and Mac versions of the software.

SCAN Geophysical awarded large seismic 3D contract from PDVSA
25 August 2008—SCAN Geophysical has been awarded the company's largest ever seismic contract, an approximately US $70 million from Petroleos de Venezuela SA for 3300 km² offshore Venezuela.

Preceded by earlier announced awards by PDVSA for seismic services offshore Venezuela, this contract calls for additional marine 3D seismic to be acquired in the Dragon Norte region. This award will backlog SCAN's proposed vessel, the M/V SCAN Resolution, into the third quarter of 2009. 

Capitan Energy Companies and Titan Resources Corporation sign agreements with the Minister of Mining and Energy for Ethiopia
25 August 2008—The Ministry of Mines and Energy and Titan Resources Corporation signed two separate production sharing agreements covering acreage in the Ogaden and Abay basins in Ethiopia for the purpose of petroleum exploration and development.

The acreage awarded in the Ogaden Basin covers blocks 1, 5, 10, and 14 (54 400 km²) and the acreage in the Abay Basin covers blocks 2, 3, 5, and 6 (48 421 km²), a total of 25 396 710 acres.

CGGVeritas opens UK Center of Excellence
25 August 2008—CGGVeritas has opened its UK Center of Excellence. The new center combines the London and Crawley offices to provide unrivalled resources, technology, and experience.

Based in Crawley, the UK center has new and upgraded facilities that include a visualization center, visual meeting rooms, and the latest in IT infrastructure.

Roxar wins Gulf of Mexico contract with Petrobras America 
26 August 2008—Roxar announced that part of its NOK 45 million subsea contract will be the provision of integrated reservoir sensors and multiphase measurement systems to Petrobras America, a subsidiary of Petrobras, for operation in the Gulf of Mexico’s Cascade and Chinook fields. The deal is worth NOK 19.5 million.

Petrobras America will install the Roxar subsea Multiphase meter, which provides continuous online monitoring of the flow rates of oil, water, and gas in subsea well streams. Roxar will also install a number of SenCorr SEPT combined sand erosion and pressure and temperature sensor systems to provide real-time information on the subsea reservoir. The sensor has separate sensing elements, wiring, and electronics, and can operate at up to 15 000 psi.

CGGVeritas announces award for ultra high-density land seismic contract
26 August 2008—CGGVeritas was awarded a contract by Qatar Petroleum to undertake a large, ultrahigh-density, high-resolution onshore seismic survey. The expected value of the contract is approximately US$140 million. Work on the project will commence near the end of 2008 and is anticipated to have a duration of about 30 months.

The survey will cover the DukhanField in Qatar that extends under desert plains, coastal salt flats, transition zones and shallow water areas.

PetrisWINDS iShare: Collaboration software for project data and asset divestitures using Microsoft Sharepoint 
26 August 2008—Petris announced the release of PetrisWINDS iShare, its new collaboration software solution aimed at energy teams that need to share information securely. Based on Microsoft's SharePoint platform, iShare is scalable to multiple companies, multiple users, and large datasets. 

Applications of iShare include property asset marketing (online data rooms), due diligence collaboration, post merger data transfer, and sharing of project data (joint venture production data for example).