An example is provided of how technology from a seemingly far-removed field of science has found its way into seismic surveying equipment. In order to achieve affordable dense sampling to remove adverse seismic-noise effects from gravitational-wave measurements, autonomous, integrated seismic nodes were developed for flexible deployment around the gravitational-wave detector's key components. The required sensitivity is achieved by utilizing a high-sensitivity, 5 Hz geophone in combination with a low noise recording channel, resulting in a self noise of < 1 ng/√Hz at 1 Hz. This specification is also promising for low-frequency single-sensor passive and active seismic acquisition. Ninety-six nodes were deployed during a field trial to demonstrate various novel passive seismic techniques for subsurface and microearthquake characterization using dense surface arrays. This showed the value of an affordable and practical dense surface array in extracting useful subsurface information from seismic noise and characterizing small earthquakes. The nodes were shown to have the long battery life required to be practical in their intended surveys, showing only 50% battery consumption after a 21-day survey at high-gain setting.

At the present, sensors are everywhere across different sectors of the oil and gas industry. Seismic acquisition in upstream, pipeline monitoring in midstream, and asset tracking in downstream are examples of applications in which we need more and more sensors to satisfy a pressing need for accuracy. Sensor data in many cases should be quickly aggregated and coordinated, sometimes from harsh environments where crew intervention and maintenance must be minimized for safety and cost reasons. This mandates data collection/transmission strategies that are power efficient and demand minimal maintenance to operate autonomously. To address this issue, a unified wireless sensing framework is required that consists of the following three components: low-power, long-range wireless sensors with inherent compatibility with the “Internet of Things” (IoT); advanced scalable wireless networking protocols; and data storage/analytics on the cloud for analysis and decision making. These three components combined create a flexible, plug-and-play, scalable network that provides worldwide accessibility to the data and is cost efficient because you pay as you grow for storage and computation. Aiming at materializing such a ubiquitous wireless sensing paradigm, we have studied the feasibility of using a new family of IoT-based wireless technologies: so-called low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs). We have conducted a proof-of-concept field test in which we have employed LoRa, a predominant member of the LPWAN family, for real-time seismic quality control/monitoring. Our field test results corroborate that cheap (less than US$10) subscription-free LoRa wireless modules can be embedded into our seismic recording systems allowing us to transmit more than 6 MB of data per node per day, while the data can be transmitted over distances of a few kilometers with less than a milliwatt of average power consumption. The transmitted data can be monitored in real time on the cloud for further analysis and decision making.

Seismic acquisition is a trade-off between image quality and cost. While there is an increasing need for higher quality images due to the more complex geologic settings of reservoirs, there is also a strong desire to reduce the cost and cycle time of seismic acquisition. Meeting these conflicting ambitions requires creative solutions. New hardware developments aim at improving survey efficiency and image quality. To optimally leverage new hardware and maximize survey efficiency, their development should go together with new insights gained from sparse sampling. Sparse sampling combines efficient data acquisition with the reconstruction of a signal by finding its coefficients as the solution of an underdetermined system. Greater survey efficiency results from compression during acquisition. For seismic wavefield sampling, the compression can take place in time, space, or both. Compression in time can be achieved by letting shot-records overlap, as in simultaneous-source acquisition for example. Compression in space can be achieved with spatial subsampling. Some recently introduced acquisition technologies already leverage the ideas from sparse sampling in practice. We believe sparse seismic wavefield sampling is not only a method to reduce costs; the flexibility to distribute sources and receivers in space and time in different ways than we are used to also will spark the acquisition technologies of the future.

Summary We present the business and technical underpinning for developing revolutionary onshore and offshore seismic acquisition technologies in order to meet the challenges of the new E&P business portfolio. In this paper we will also describe new seismic acquisition systems developed with external technology partners and report their progress. These new systems aim at disrupting both the onshore and offshore seismic industry by delivering accurate and high quality seismic data with significant cost improvement. For land Shell is pushing toward a million channel system development in order to drastically drive the cost down with high receiver and source efficiency, and strongly improve the seismic quality with WAZ, long offsets, and the broad band. For the offshore, a multi-source fast deployed ocean bottom node (OBN) system is being developed to drastically reduce the survey cost such that it can be cost effectively applied to large exploration surveys as well as higher resolution surveys for 4D. Shell expects to commercialize these new technologies with partners in order to deploy them to Shell assets in the nearer term and industry in the longer term.

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