Craig J. Beasley

A new look at marine simultaneous sources

Cost is one of the fundamental factors that determines where and how a seismic survey will be conducted. Moreover, the cost of 3D seismic acquisition and processing often plays a significant role in determining whether or not a prospect is economic. Unit costs of seismic data acquisition and processing have dropped dramatically as the technology has matured; however, these economies have raised demand for larger and more complex acquisition plans. More than ever, there is a great need to gain efficiency. In this article, I discuss a field experiment carried out to test the feasibility of employing marine sources activated simultaneously. Simultaneous source firing has long been recognized as a possible strategy for achieving dramatic cost reductions in seismic data acquisition. This approach is novel in that it does not require source-signature encoding (although such encoding combined with this approach is beneficial), but, rather, relies on spatial-source positioning to allow for separation of the signa...

Simultaneous Sources: a technology whose time has come

Summary It is a rare and exhilarating moment when an emerging technology deve lops so rapidly that it warrants a special session at the SEG Annual Meeting, while, at the same time, it remains so compact that most of what is known on the topic will be presented at that session. We find ourselves in that situation in this special session on the use of simultaneous sources in the marine environment. In this talk I will give an introduction to the session including some history of the problem, both within and outside of the geophysical community, as well as motivation and current issues that are stimulating research and commercial efforts.

Wave equation receiver deghosting

Current solutions to receiver deghosting generally involve making complementary measurements of the wavefield or, alternatively, involve estimation of data not recorded due to ghost interference. Both solutions offer challenges in practice in that marine multimeasurement streamers are commercially available only on a limited basis and existing single-measurement deghosting methods must estimate unrecorded frequencies near the ghost notches. Here, we develop a new wave equation-based approach for single measurement deghosting that does not rely on such estimation procedures.