Operators and contractors are polling the depths of their ingenuity trying to find the best way to peek beneath the salt blanket that conceals deepwater treasure. Deciding the best approach to sub-salt imaging is occupying some of the most talented teams in the geophysical industry these days. Ever since post-stack depth migration broke the ice more than two decades ago, enabling operators to determine there were in fact potential hydrocarbon-bearing structures beneath the salt, scientists have been trying to improve their ability to consistently and accurately image those structures. The rewards have justified their efforts. Recently, Shell and BP have tackled the design of marine seismic surveys, challenging the conventional wisdom that has prevailed for a dozen or so years that acquisition should be done with conventional towed arrays and imaging problems should be resolved through processing. The companies have done extensive work on acquisition design with promising results.
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