Incoming SEG Pres. Beasley links energy demand, need for research

The incoming president of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists sees "a strange set of circumstances" emerging in the oil and gas industry.

All signs point to greatly increased demand for energy, including oil and natural gas, notes Craig Beasley, chief geoscientist at WesternGeco and a Schlumberger fellow.

"The way to satisfy that demand would be through new technology and increased effort in the field, yet I think it's fair to say that today that's not being done," Beasley says.

Oil and gas companies, which must produce the needed energy and for which profits currently are high, aren't rushing to respond to the need.

"To be fair, there are signs that activity is increasing, but it will take time to translate into a market response," the new SEG president says.

"We look at the technology spend at oil companies, and it seems to be decreasing," he adds, although exceptions can be found. "There are some major oil companies and a few of the service companies who do believe in technology and are investing quite heavily in the future. I believe that those are likely to be the winners in the long term."

An important product of past research is 3D seismic, which oil companies consistently cite as especially valuable, Beasley notes. But the value creators have largely missed out on the rewards.

"When you look at providers of that [set of 3D technologies], it hasn't been very profitable for them."

Evolving role

Along with profitability challenges, geophysical contractors have had trouble communicating to the financial world their complex activities and evolving role in the upstream petroleum business.

Outside the oil and gas industry, for example, the view persists that seismic surveys are principally exploratory tools; in fact, seismic and other geophysical methods have become at least as important to reservoir monitoring and production management as they are to exploration. When investors hear that exploration is declining in relation to development activities, Beasley says, some of them conclude the news is bad for geophysical contractors.

"The old split of oil companies' efforts into exploration and production in a way doesn't fit with today's reality very well," he says. For example, production departments often conduct work that's technically exploration in existing fields.

"When you shoot a 3D seismic survey, you really don't know all the things that your customer's going to do with that data. It may primarily be a production survey, but there may be an exploration component to it."

Although contractors have written down much of the value of the speculative seismic data that glutted the market in the late 1990s, Beasley sees no imminent resurgence of acquisition activity for speculative data. Spec data shot in the 1990s remains on the market, and oil companies have large libraries of proprietary data.

And although acquisition and processing techniques have improved, "I wouldn't say we've obsoleted a lot of data, and that existing data can satisfy some of the market demand," Beasley adds. "I'd like to see demand for newer, higher-resolution spec data, but I'm not sure it will happen in the near future. In today's environment, geophysical contractors are requiring high levels of precommitments for spec programs."

The trend among geophysical contractors is "to get closer to the reservoir" and "play a larger role in solving the actual production problem."

Beasley notes "strong moves in that direction in the last 10 years, even the last 2 years" through advances in methods such as sequential 3D surveys over producing fields, which the industry calls 4D. In the past few years, Beasley says, this technique has undergone "unheralded advances," especially with the important quality of repeatability—the extent to which acquisition parameters such as shot and receiver positions are identical from one survey to the next.

In 4D surveys, companies use 3D surveys shot at intervals to monitor reservoir changes occurring as production advances. Ideally, differences in survey data reflect changes in the reservoir due to production rather than discrepancies between surveys due to variation of acquisition conditions and parameters.

"The striking difference is that now we can take 3D surveys that have been repeated and just directly subtract the data and see reservoir signal," Beasley says. "A few years back, before breakthroughs in positioning accuracy and control of the acquisition system, you had to process the data so that all the differences in the acquisition could be removed. And sometimes you couldn't remove all of them."

Acquisition breakthroughs include steerable streamers and improved navigation systems, which help contractors replicate surveys over a given field. Because the improved repeatability of surveys reduces the need for time-consuming data-processing, contractors often can produce 4D results as soon as shooting ends. That's especially important because the frequency of surveys in 4D projects is increasing.

Citing the "incredibly high production rates of some wells," Beasley says, "It makes sense to look for changes in the reservoir in maybe a few months' time frame, where in the past you'd look every year or so."

In some fields, Beasley notes, companies are installing permanent instrumentation on sea floors "to basically reshoot the data at will."

Elsewhere in the broadening menu of geophysical tools, an area Beasley considers underutilized is land 3D, where the problem is the cost-value proposition. Contractors are working to reduce costs of land acquisition, but the new SEG president thinks improving the value of 3D surveys through technology can produce comparable results.

"It may cost you a little more to go to a single-sensor approach, for example, but if you get better data out of it you have a much better solution for your reservoir problems," he says. In single-sensor surveys, receiving instruments record seismic responses in discrete channels rather than in groups called arrays, as in traditional surveys. Single-sensor recording allows denser sampling of seismic wave fields but requires more processing.

Beasley's hopes also remain high for new processing solutions: "I think we've only scratched the surface with tying seismic data with the reservoir."

Techniques such as amplitude-variation-with-offset (AVO, which yields information about reservoir characteristics) and prestack depth migration (PSDM, an advanced imaging technique) have become common.

"But we need to have steps which go further in integrating the data with other subsurface information," such as well data and vertical seismic profiles (which collect seismic data in wells), Beasley says.

"I think the instrumented reservoir will occur. I think there's a lot of interest in doing it. But the oil industry is well known for being slow to take up new technology."

Although he's worried about the adequacy of research overall, Beasley is encouraged by renewal of basic research by some oil companies in specific areas. They include new ways to collect geophysical data for specific problems such as subsalt imaging and methods for collecting marine seismic data "in ways that will give us a richer set of azimuths and offsets to deal with."

For the organization he will lead for a year, Beasley cites globalization as a major emphasis.

"It's a challenge for companies to deal with, and it's been a main thrust of our work at SEG: how to be nimble and how to deliver all the services to our members no matter where they are on the planet."

Career highlights

Craig Beasley became chief geoscientist of WesternGeco in 2002 and is a Schlumberger fellow.