Pemex Hires CGG to Conduct Largest Ever WAZ Survey

November 7, 2013

CGG announced today that it has been selected to acquire a large high-end seismic acquisition survey in the Mexican waters of the Gulf of Mexico on behalf of Pemex.

The survey is phase 5 in Pemex’s Centauro program, the largest ever proprietary 3D wide-azimuth program to be conducted worldwide. Phase 5 will add another 6,850 km2 of data to the existing 25,000 km2 already acquired since Centauro began in Oct 2010, bringing the total volume to almost 32,000 km2.

The survey will be acquired by the Oceanic Vega and Oceanic Sirius, CGG’s two state-of-the-art 20-streamer vessels. The project is expected to begin in mid-November and be completed in March 2014.

Antonio Escalera, VP, Exploration, Pemex, said: “Since Pemex took the innovative step of adopting wide-azimuth acquisition in 2010, this technology has consistently demonstrated its reliability at delivering superior illumination and imaging to help explore Mexico’s deep water hydrocarbon resources.”

Jean-Georges Malcor, CEO, CGG said: “This fifth phase of the Centauro program testifies to the successful long-term exploration partnership CGG has developed with Pemex in the Gulf of Mexico. We will continue to work closely with Pemex to ensure this new wide-azimuth survey meets their E&P objectives.”

What is Wide Azimuth (WAZ)?

Conventional 3D marine acquisition records a limited subset of the reflected wavefield because of its narrow range of source-receiver azimuths. This method of recording just a small percentage of the total wavefield provides limited illumination and resolution.

On the other hand, land and seabed acquisition have sometimes used wide-azimuth geometries but only at the expense of large spacing of either shots or receivers, or both. This coarse sampling can lead to an aliased representation of the wavefield and hence noisy and misleading images of the earth.

As expained by CGG on its website, to achieve an optimum image of the sub-surface, we need both wide-azimuth recording and sufficiently dense sampling to obtain a full representation of the seismic wavefield. In the marine environment, CGG’ Wide Azimuth (WAZ) recording provides this by using a wide array of receivers for every shotpoint; for land and seabed surveys, our technology provides dense shotpoint sampling designed to sample the wavefield adequately. A good analogy is the use of very large arrays for radio telescopes that give unparalleled, high-resolution images of outer space.

Benefits: