Business news for the week of 19 July 2010 News section front
Past news briefs
Seismic crew survey reports TGS charters additional vessel for West Africa opportunities 12 July 2010—TGS has chartered additional vessel capacity to address multiclient opportunities in West Africa. TGS has chartered Fugro's Geo-Caribbean for approximately seven months. The Geo-Caribbean is a modern vessel capable of towing twelve long offset streamers. It is anticipated that TGS will take delivery of the vessel on or around 1 September 2010 and that over 10,000 km2 of new 3D will be acquired under this new vessel charter. Data to be acquired with the Geo-Caribbean is supported by industry pre-funding. GS announces commencement of multiclient 3D survey in East Shetland Basin 14 July 2010—TGS has commenced a new multiclient 3D survey in partnership with PGS. This project, ESB10, covers an 1100 km2 area in the East Shetland Basin area immediately west of the United Kingdom/Norway border. Ramform Viking, operated by PGS, is acquiring this multiclient high-density 3D survey, utilizing 16 streamers. The project allows TGS and PGS to continue building a multiclient 3D grid south of the successful East Shetland Basin multiclient 3D project acquired in 2009 (ESB09). The ESB10 multiclient 3D survey is supported by industry funding and data from the survey will be available for customers in mid 2011. Ingrain names new CEO as company accelerates growth plans
15 July 2010—Ingrain promoted Marcus Ganz to chief executive officer. He joined Ingrain in January 2010 as chief operating officer after 29 years of international experience at Schlumberger and WesternGeco. Ganz's experience spans many countries and regions around the globe. As a member of the executive team managing WesternGeco over a period of four years, he was VP of the land product line and later VP and regional manager responsible for all activities in South America. From 2006 to 2008 he was the general manager of Schlumberger Oilfield Services for Argentina and Chile. During this period he served on the Schlumberger Ltd. Business Conduct Group, a rotating team of senior managers responsible for the worldwide implementation and monitoring of the Schlumberger code of ethics. Concedo awards contract to PetroMarker for EM survey 15 July 2010—PetroMarker AS and Concedo ASA have signed a contract for the acquisition of EM data on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) TEMP-VEL, the proprietary marine vertical EM technology of PetroMarker, will be used to provide Concedo with assessment data. The work will be carried out this season with the newly mobilized Volstad Surveyor and will be completed before the end of August. The parties have agreed to keep location, duration and price confidential. TGS expands multiclient seismic library in offshore Greenland 19 July 2010—TGS announced acquisition commencement of 15,000 km of multiclient 2D seismic data off the northwest coast of Greenland in Baffin Bay. This season marks the 12th consecutive year of new data acquisition by TGS in Greenland. TGS will utilize the M/V Bergen Surveyor to acquire the survey. The data processing will be done at TGS' imaging center in Bedford, England.
TGS dominates the multiclient seismic market in Greenland and following the 2010 acquisition plan the TGS Greenland seismic library will contain approximately 120,000 km of data, of which approx 40,000 km is located in the Baffin Bay area.
Data from the Baffin Bay survey will be available for customers in early 2011. The survey is supported by industry prefunding. VSG announces new release of Open Inventor 3D graphics toolkit
19 July 2010—Visualization Sciences Group (VSG) released Open Inventor 8.1, a new version of their object-oriented 3D graphics development toolkit. Open Inventor 8.1 is now available for C++ and .NET, on Windows and Linux 32-and 64-bit platforms. Numerous optimizations, generalized use of the latest OpenGL techniques, and finely tuned memory consumption give Open Inventor 8.1 a display rate that is nearly equivalent to graphics hardware peak performances. This new release also introduces a dynamic display resolution mechanism, where advanced rendering effects are progressively applied during interaction, refining image quality on the fly, without sacrificing interactivity. Volume masks and real-time shadows are two major new features provided by VolumeViz 8.1, while the MeshViz XLM 8.1 extension benefits from more parallelized extraction algorithms and significantly improved performance. Finally, ScaleViz 8.1 now takes full advantage of multi-GPU configurations, with optimal performance on NVIDIA QuadroPlex systems, using the NVIDIA CompleX engine. CGGVeritas opens Luanda Geology & Geophysics Center 20 July 2010— CGGVeritas opened a new Geology & Geophysics (G&G) Center, which expands on the capabilities provided by their Processing & Imaging Center that has been operating in Luanda, Angola for over 10 years. The new center will provide training, interpretation, and reservoir modeling for prospect generation and field development projects. The new G&G Center was launched in collaboration with senior management at SONANGOL EP Exploration and will house over 25 geoscientists from Angola and around the world to provide a broad range of technical expertise including Hampson-Russell software and services. The center will also host CGGVeritas University to offer a unique catalog of leadership and technology training courses in geology, geophysics, petrophysics, and reservoir engineering. | 
