Geophysical infill management for improving the efficiency of

marine seismic surveys

Phil Fontana, Brian Donnelly
Polarcus
Introduction
The marine streamer seismic acquisition method is
the dominant and most cost-effective technique for
acquiring seismic data in the marine environment. In a
relatively short space of time the method has progressed
from using single short streamers with low volume
airgun sources to multi-streamer, multi-source and
indeed multi-vessel arrays, which can rapidly sweep up
data over vast areas.
Coverage and infill
When acquiring data over such large areas it is
important to ensure that the full area is being properly
surveyed, and that there is sufficient coverage across
the entire prospect. To improve the overall data quality
it is essential that each portion of the surface area has
a multiplicity of data points, which is measured by
so-called fold of coverage. The general stipulation is
that a certain minimum degree of coverage must be
achieved across the entire survey area, spread across
a number of offset ranges corresponding to the length
of the seismic streamers. In a perfect world it would
be possible to design the geometry of the survey such
that comprehensive coverage can always be achieved.
Unfortunately the marine environment is highly
dynamic, with sea conditions, weather and currents
affecting the movement of seismic vessels, source
arrays and, most significantly, the seismic streamers
themselves. The consequence of all of this motion is that
there are almost always zones of low fold or complete
holes left in the coverage. In order to account for these
deficiencies, additional seismic lines infill lines need
to be acquired. For some projects, for instance in areas
of high current to tidal variations, the degree of infill
required may be as much as 25-30%. The unerring fact
about seismic acquisition is that time equals money, and
adding 25% to the cost of a multi-million dollar project
is a significant issue. As a consequence, strenuous
efforts are made to reduce the level of infill which needs
to be shot, for instance steering for coverage whereby
the vessel is manouevered in order to close up gaps
in coverage. This tends just to move the area of low
coverage rather than eliminate it.
Fresnel Zone Concepts
Coverage is normally measured by dividing the survey
area into cells, or bins, of a fixed size, oriented in the
inline and crossline direction to the acquisition direction.
For a typical modern 3D survey the bin size is 6.25m
inline and 25m crossline in acquisition. Data is often
later interpolated in processing. Coverage is measured
by the fold of data points within each bin, but for all
offsets of the streamer, so that the coverage criteria are
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the same for the furthest offsets as for the nearest. This
makes sense in terms of surface coverage, but how does
this tie in with what we are actually trying to achieve,
i.e. produce a geophysical image of the subsurface?
We should be designing surveys that are optimised to
produce the required input to the migration process that
will produce our final image.
Here is where the concept of Fresnel Zones is useful.
The theory is involved (see Monk, 2009) but the
essential principle is that at longer seismic offsets the
target reflectors are deeper and the expected frequency
return is thereby lower, because of the attenuation
effects of the earth. The Fresnel criterion is based on the
width of the wavefront required to actually give a valid
image for a given frequency, and is a general property of
waves. Crucially in this context, for lower frequencies
the Fresnel Zone increases in size.
The main premise is that for pre-stack migrations a trace
that falls within a Fresnel zone determined by depth,
frequency, and offset fully samples an area of the subsurface and is thus the required input to the migration.
(Monk, 2009)
For a survey with regular offset and azimuth distribution,
as may be found in land or OBC acquisition, the Fresnel
Zones are circular. However it can be shown (Monk
2009) that for the inline-biased geometries of streamer
seismic, the Fresnel Zones are stretched into ellipses.
This is nicely shown in the gather display in Figure 1,
where the size of the Fresnel zone increases with twoway time, but lengthens in offset.
Practical Application
It is possible to calculate the size of the Fresnel Zone
for particular geological targets. It is a function of
target depth, average velocity and the frequency range
expected. It also involves an analysis of NMO stretch
which considers the degree to which seismic gathers are
allowed to deform with offset.
What does this mean in a practical sense? Essentially,
its quite simple given the appropriate geology, longer
offsets can have larger bin sizes. When the calculations
are performed it is surprising just how large these can
be. This means that apparent holes in surface coverage
for larger offsets ranges may not make any actual
difference to the quality of the final migrated image, and
that it is may not be necessary to acquire as much infill.

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IPETGAS 2013

Fan Mode technique

A technique which blends beautifully with the ideas of
Fresnel Zone binning is the Fan Mode method. In the
past it was normal fashion to try to keep the seismic
streamers parallel as the vessel progressed through
the water. In practice this was always impossible to
achieve as there was no way to control or influence the
movement of the streamers on a local scale. However,
in recent years technology has developed such that
streamers can be controlled by the use of steerage
devices. It can be shown (Capelle and Matthews, 2009)
that optimal coverage can be achieved by diverging the
streamers such that they fan-out behind the seismic
boat, as shown in Figure 2. This provides automatic
overlap with adjacent lines, reducing the possibility of
gaps, and also compensates very well for the effects
caused by high degrees of streamer feather due to crosscurrents. In terms of standard static binning, this might
seem to be a risky strategy, as it opens up the possibility
of coverage loss at far offsets. However, considering
the Fresnel Zone condition, we can see that any gaps
induced in far offset coverage by use of Fan Mode are
considerably smaller than the cross-line bin width sizes
resulting from Fresnel Zone analysis.
Operational Implementation
How do we apply these ideas in a field setting? The first
step is to obtain some legacy seismic data, if available,
or if not to use some of the initial data from the survey.
This is input to Fresnel Zone modelling software, for
instance OMNI from Gedco. This outputs inline and
crossline Fresnel Zone sizes (semi-major and semiminor axes of the elliptical Fresnel Zone) for defined
offset ranges within the streamer, typically four. Note
that for the streamer seismic case only the crossline
dimension is important. For each offset range the
crossline Fresnel Zone size is adjusted to 75%, ensuring
a 25% overlap. This value is then used as the permitted
flexi-binning expansion in the Navigation and survey
coverage system, for instance IONs ORCA suite.
Another factor is that as there is no need to chase
coverage on adjacent lines, the seismic lines can be shot
as preplot, i.e. steering on source position. This allows
for easier survey planning and improves coverage in
itself, but is also very important for potential 4D work.
West African case study
In late 2012 the Polarcus Naila acquired a 3D survey
offshore Guinea-Bissau for the Polarcus Multi-Client
group. It was decided that this would be a good candidate
for the application of FresnelzZone binning combined
with fan mode acquisition. The prospect is typified by
deep water, showing a progression from 900m down to
around 3,000m, with distinct geological targets in the
shallow and deeper parts of the section. It also featured
relatively long streamers and a wide configuration, so
there was a considerable range of offsets present in the
data.

As shown by the brute stack image in Figure 3, four

targets were considered in the Fresnel Zone analysis,
ranging from the water bottom at the shallow end of the
prospect to a deep reflector at almost 6 seconds TWT.
Obviously the offset ranges, velocities and expected
frequencies are significantly different for all of the
targets.
For each target, maximum frequencies, average
velocities and depths were calculated, and these values
were input into the FZB module in the OMNI survey
design package. The results of this analysis are shown
in the table in Figure 4, indicating that in the extreme
case of the far offsets, and allowing a 25% overlap, it
is possible to obtain completely valid data with a crossline bin width of 175m.
Quality control of survey coverage
So far we have only considered the theoretical concepts
and have seen that by applying the Fresnel Zone binning
method it is possible to produce very nice looking, even
coverage. However, the real test and quality assurance
of this technique lies in the analysis of the seismic
data itself. To this end, 3D common offset brute stack
volumes are produced onboard the vessel in near realtime. By looking at cross-line and time slices in each
offset range the validity of the method can be ensured
if theres an actual gap in the data it will be evident in
the QC stacks.
Results
The table in Figure 5 shows the infill percentages from
a number of recent 3D surveys from around the world
which have been acquired using the geophysical infill
management strategy described in this paper.
Conclusions
It has been shown that the application of relatively
straightforward geophysical principles married to
streamer control and thorough planning can significantly
reduce the level of infill required in a seismic survey. A
reduction from 20% to 10% infill can result in savings
millions of dollars in a typical survey. We expect that
these techniques will become the norm in future marine
seismic 3D surveys.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the contributions of the
following in this study:
Polarcus Multi-Client for allowing use of the data
examples
Management and crew of the Polarcus seismic vessels
which acquired the data shown in this paper.
The GX Technology onboard processing group for
producing the seismic displays

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Finally, many thanks to IPETGAS for inviting Polarcus

to participate in this conference.

Figure 3

References
Fresnel zone binning: Application to 3D seismic fold
and coverage assessments
DAVID J. MONK, Apache Corporation, Leading Edge,
March 2009
Intelligent Infill for Cost Effective 3D Seismic Marine
Acquisitions
P. CAPELLE & P. MATTHEWS, Total E & P Nigeria,
EAGE 2009
FZB Review. M. ROGERS, Polarcus. Polarcus internal
document 2012
Figure 4
Figure 1

Figure 5

Figure 2

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Trkiye 19. Uluslararas Petrol ve Doal Gaz Kongre ve Sergisi 15-17 Mays 2013