Aside the collaboration with INRIA (Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique) on Full Wave Inversion applied to surface waves, Realtimeseismic (a french SME which works in the domain of seismic data processing) also pursue the objective to develop and promote the concept of “frugal seismic acquisition”.
The main goal is to prove that, in many cases, companies tend to oversize the seismic surveys by using large receiver density and a high number of sources for a marginal gain in terms of processed data quality.
The frugal seismic approach consists in acquiring an optimal number of traces, rather sparse in space, and to rely on 5D regularization algorithm to reconstruct a full volume of interpretable data. It is a combination of appropriate survey design, use of latest technology of autonomous 1C nodes deployed once in a single live spread, and smart algorithms of interpolation and regularisation. The concept of frugal acquisition is particularly attractive for geothermal industry where the cost limits are high, but 3D-seismic is still a paramount for de-risking the prospects.
The R&D work on the topic consisted in studying the impact on decimation (regular or random) on 2D and 3D data sets, conducting new recordings of low fold data sets and developing a know-how to extract the best value out of limited data.