Randy Davis, Managing Director, ION-GXT Guide

Welcome to the Third Edition of MENA Imaging Solut[ION]s
On behalf of my team in Cairo, it is my pleasure to welcome you to the 3rd edition of the MENA Imaging Solut[ION]s, a quarterly technical newsletter for the E&P Industry in the North Africa and the Middle East regions.

I am also pleased to announce that as part of our growth strategy in the MENA region, I will be moving to Cairo to head up the ION-GXT data processing facility from the 1st of August
2011.

The ION-GXT data processing facility in Cairo has doubled in size since its launch in 2008. In our five year plan (2010-2015), we are forecasting further growth resulting in increased market share and client base. 

Read the complete Welcome Letter from Randy Davis.

M. Cvetkovic, Z. Zhou, & P.A. Farmer, ION Geophysical
Paper from EAGE 2011

WAZ acquisition has re-energized the sub-salt imaging business by greatly enhancing our ability to attenuate multiples and to illuminate sub-salt targets [Regone 2007]. A great amount of WAZ data have been acquired in the last few years in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM), offshore West Africa, and elsewhere. The most commonly used geometry in these surveys builds a cross-line fold of 8 and inline fold of around 24, with cross-line offset ranging from -4200m to +4200m, and inline offset ranging from ~400m to ~7600m. Other geometries generally do not provide offset coverage much wider or longer than this setup, which we will refer to as the "baseline" WAZ for brevity.

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David Yingst, Chao Wang, Jaewoo Park, Robert Bloor, Jacques Leveille, and Paul Farmer,  ION Geophysical
Paper from EAGE 2011

Waveform inversion is a method for obtaining high-fidelity velocity models for seismic imaging by minimizing some cost function of the difference between experimental and modeled wavefield data. It was introduced by Lailly, Tarantola, andMora using a gradient-based algorithm (Lailly, 1983; Tarantola, 1984, 1987; Mora, 1986, 1988). Since then substantial research has been conducted in both the time and frequency domains (e.g. Sirgue and Pratt, 2004; Shin andMin, 2006; Vigh and Starr, 2006; Operto et al.,2007; Vigh and Starr, 2008).  Our time-domain implementation has been successfully applied to real 3D data sets.

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Edward Jenner, ION Geophysical
Presented at CSEG 2011

Unconventional reservoirs have become important hydrocarbon objectives for oil and gas companies. Although advances in drilling technology have been the primary factors in achieving economic viability in these tight reservoirs, 3D seismic data has played an increasingly important role in development success.
View the abstract                              Watch the presentation

Carolyn Dingus, ION Geophysical
Article from January issue of Petroleum Africa

As E&P companies utilize a variety of methods to try and understand their reservoirs and maximize the recovery of hydrocarbons, the treatment of seismic data becomes critically important. Many factors influence the reliability of the seismic data to initially ensure drilling success and later to provide a better understanding of the reservoir characteristics. Adequate and proper noise attenuation methods help to maximize the potential benefit and contribution of the seismic data in exploration and development. The perfect acquisition environment only exists in a synthetic model. In reality, we are faced with many sources of noise in marine, Ocean Bottom Cable (OBC), or land acquisition. One of the key components of seismic processing is determining which part of the recorded energy is noise and removing it from the data.

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