Challenges and Recent Progress in Seismic Imaging Below Salt
The business of hydrocarbon exploration depends on our ability
to make images of the subsurface with acoustic waves. When the subsurface
contains complex salt structures this task is difficult. Industry
and academia have invested years of R&D to improve the seismic imaging method and
these efforts have led to significant progress. Despite that progress,
industry is still having difficulty imaging potential hydrocarbon deposits
below salt structures. I'll describe the steps that BP took to understand
the subsalt imaging problem better and how we designed new data acquisition
techniques that are leading to improved subsalt images.
John Etgen, British Petrolium