Independent simultaneous source acquisition and processing

Abstract

Seismic surveys are often constrained by the time needed to activate all the required sources so the source signals do not interfere with each other. Simultaneous source seismic acquisition, also referred to as blended acquisition, is an effective method for reducing the cost and improving the quality of seismic surveys by eliminating the requirement that the sources do not interfere with each other. Independent simultaneous shooting is a unique form of blended acquisition in which sources operate independently of each other and the receiver recording is continuous. This acquisition method is particularly efficient and robust in obtaining high-density source grids for land and marine surveys. Processing the simultaneous source data depends on the randomness of the shot times to create a situation where the signal is coherent, and the interference is random in common-receiver gathers. Although the older and simpler method of separating interfering shots with random noise attenuation works well when the residual interference noise left by the random noise attenuation is acceptable, higher separation quality is possible using a shot separation process based on sparse inversion and compressive sensing methodology. We found that the resulting simultaneous source surveys produced images that were equivalent to or better than conventional seismic surveys, while requiring less acquisition effort, thus reducing costs.

Preview Number 184

“…Originally the fleets used sweeps with different lengths, or pseudorandom sweeps (Dean 2014), but later this approach was discarded in favour of every fleet using the same sweep, which simplified acquisition with no discernible effect on data quality (Abma et al, 2015). This technique requires the system to be recording data continuously, from which each record is then extracted.…”

“…This technique requires the system to be recording data continuously, from which each record is then extracted. The effect of any interference between records that remains after extraction/deblending and noise removal is considered to be more than offset by improvements due to the increase in spatial sampling made possible by the efficiency (Abma et al, 2015).…”

High Productivity Vibroseis Techniques: a Review

“…Originally the fleets used sweeps with different lengths, or pseudorandom sweeps (Dean 2014), but later this approach was discarded in favour of every fleet using the same sweep, which simplified acquisition with no discernible effect on data quality (Abma et al, 2015). This technique requires the system to be recording data continuously, from which each record is then extracted.…”

Seismic noise attenuation using an online subspace tracking algorithm

“…A successful separation between useful reflection signals and unwanted noise is a long standing problem in the area of seismic data processing and greatly affects the fidelity of subsequent seismic imaging and geophysical inversion, like amplitude-variation-with-offset (AVO) inversion, full waveform inversion, attenuation estimation and geological interpretation (He & Wu 2015;Li et al 2016a;Lines et al 2016;Liu et al 2016a;Mousavi & Langston 2016a,b;Mousavi et al 2016;Qu & Verschuur 2016;Qu et al 2016a;Zhang et al 2016f;Jin et al 2017;Li et al 2017;Ebrahimi et al 2017;Mousavi & Langston 2017). Effectively rejecting the cross-talk interference caused in the simultaneous-source seismic acquisition also plays a significant role in tremendously saving the data recording cost (Berkhout 2008;Qu et al 2014Qu et al , 2015Qu et al , 2016bAbma et al 2015;Chen 2015a;Zu et al 2015Zu et al , 2017aZhou 2017).…”