Petroleum Geo Services : Innovative PGS Barents Sea Focus in GeoExpro

The south-western Barents Sea is characterized by a complex geological regime with a heterogeneous overburden. A key challenge in producing an accurate image of the subsurface lies in creating a velocity model which describes the recorded data well. Refraction-based Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) has become the standard tool for high-resolution velocity model building in the Barents Sea. Nevertheless, due to the lack of recorded long offsets, model depths have been limited to the shallow overburden in the past.

In 2018 PGS and TGS utilized a novel acquisition setup for acquiring an ultra high density 3D seismic dataset in the Barents Sea, covering parts of the Hammerfest Basin and Finnmark Platform. In addition to 16 densely spaced streamers, three streamers were extended from 7 km to 10 km length, allowing the recording of deeper diving waves (refractions) and thereby enabling FWI to produce velocity updates to greater depths.