Spatial Energy and Blueback Reservoir introduce the Spatial Image Connector

12 October 2010—Spatial Energy and Blueback Reservoir announced the release of the Spatial Image Connector (SIC) plug-in for Petrel reservoir engineering software. The plug-in will be available 1 November 2010, on the Schlumberger Ocean Store.

Blueback Reservoir and Spatial Energy collaborated with Apache Corporation and quickly produced the first release of this very simple yet powerful plug-in. 

William R. Muehlberger to receive Marcus Milling legendary geoscientist medal

13 October 2010—The American Geological Institute (AGI) has awarded William R. Muehlberger, Professor Emeritus, Department of Geological Sciences of the University of Texas at Austin, the 2010 Marcus Milling Legendary Geoscientist Medal.  Established in 1999, the award is presented to a geoscientist who has demonstrated a long history of scientific achievement and exceptional service to the geoscience profession.

Muehlberger received both his BS and M.S. in geology 1949 and then his PhD in 1954 from the California Institute of Technology.  He taught structural geology and tectonics at the University of Texas at Austin for over fifty years. During his impressive career, he supervised over 90 PhD and MA/MS theses. This work has lead to a greater understanding of tectonics in the western United States and Latin America.

In addition to his traditional teaching role, Muehlberger has trained astronauts in geology and was Principal Investigator of the geology team for the last two Apollo missions to the moon. The largest moon rock returned by Apollo astronauts was named "Big Muley" in his honor.

Muehlberger has a long record of service to the geoscience community. He has been a distinguished lecturer for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, is a committee member for the National Academy of Science, and continues as a geological advisor to NASA's Space Shuttle Earth Observation Project.

He has received numerous awards during his career including the AAPG Distinguished Educator Award (2002), the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement (1973) and the NASA Public Service Medal (1999).

It is for his distinguished teaching career, his role with the U.S. astronaut corps, and his research in tectonics that AGI has deemed William Muehlberger extremely worthy of the Marcus Milling Legendary Geoscientist Medal.

Spectrum processes Bahamas survey

13 October, 2010—Spectrum recently completed the acquisition of long-offset data for Bahamas Petroleum Company (BPC) in the southern blocks of Bahamas waters close to the border with Cuba, and seismic data processing is currently underway at its Houston Data Processing and Imaging Centre.

Previous data in the area are from the 1980s, using F-K demultiple and post-stack migration technology. Modern acquisition and processing techniques are proving effective in providing significant improvement in the quality and resolution of the data.

A combination of 2D surface-related multiple elimination (SRME) to attenuate water bottom related multiples and high-resolution radon demultiple to attenuate faster interbed multiples has been used. These techniques have been successful in minimizing multiples in this dataset. The data also benefited from specialist noise reduction using Spectrum’s proprietary NoiseRM process.

Previous data in this area used only poststack migration, but for the new data two passes of Kirchhoff prestack time migration have been used the first pass to produce a migration velocity field with analysis every 1 km, and the second pass to finally migrate the data more accurately. Subsequently, a final velocity analysis was run on this migrated data to provide a final stacking velocity.

WesternGeco commences industry’s first dual coil shooting survey

14 October 2010—WesternGeco has begun acquisition of the Revolution multiclient survey. Revolution marks the first time that dual-coil shooting multivessel full-azimuth acquisition has been performed commercially.
 
Located in the East Breaks and Garden Banks areas of the Western Gulf of Mexico, the Revolution multiclient survey will provide full-azimuth (FAZ) coverage for over 130 OCS blocks.

Building on multi- and wide-azimuth techniques, FAZ dual-coil shooting is a new method of acquiring ultralong-offset marine seismic data using four vessels following a circular path. This acquisition provides better target illumination in challenging environments by enabling greater azimuthal coverage and a higher signal-to-noise ratio.

University of Oklahoma receives software gift from Blueback Reservoir

15 October 2010—University of Oklahoma officials announced a software gift valued at US $1 million from Blueback Reservoir, an independent global provider of 3D modeling solutions and services.
The gift will provide students, faculty, and researchers at the ConocoPhillips School of Geology and Geophysics access to exploration and geologic modeling software used by global oil and gas companies.
The gift is Blueback’s Toolbox Suite for Petrel. The University of Oklahoma established the first petroleum geology program in the nation. The school currently has more than120 undergraduate majors and 100 graduate students in geology and geophysics.
In addition to the teaching component, software also will be used collaboratively across several OU departments, including petroleum engineering, chemical engineering, geology and geophysics, and mathematics.

Blueback Reservoir donated the software to OU as part of an effort to increase industry-standard geology and geophysics software knowledge for students. This preparation is designed to broaden the skill sets of university geoscience and petroleum engineering graduates, giving them an advantage in the job market.

Westheimer Energy Consultants and FileTek Collaborate

19 October 2010—Westheimer Energy and FileTek of Rockville, Maryland, USA announced a joint agreement to deliver an integrated seismic data store solution. Based on FileTek’s StorHouse platform, the integrated seismic data-store project will enable oil and gas companies to store, back up, automatically manage, and access all seismic data types – raw through post-stack –with ensured data integrity and availability throughout their useful lifecycle.

StorHouse is a storage virtualization and data management platform that can transparently archive, retrieve, administer, and protect massive amounts of relational and file-based information using an automatically managed pool of traditional and alternative storage devices such as disk and high-performance/high-density tape. Organizations deploy StorHouse for active archives, database extension systems, digital preservation initiatives, and native file format backups of terabytes to petabytes of unstructured data residing on operational systems. StorHouse eliminates the need to restore data from tape to disk prior to access, thereby enabling direct, SQL access to all seismic survey data from any media, including tape.