Very pleased to see GeoExpro publish an insightful article by my long-time friend and colleague, Richard Taylor, on a technology that has been central to my career and the cornerstone of my business: seismic vectorising. Despite being around for over 30 years, seismic vectorising remains underappreciated in our industry. Many professionals either overlook its potential, question its quality, or are uncertain about its legal implications. Yet, this technology has led to remarkable success stories. A standout example comes from the time when Richard and I worked together at Seiscan Geodata Ltd. and we were contracted by Cairn Energy to vectorise a significant amount of legacy seismic data from an Indian concession previously abandoned. The results were nothing short of spectacular—leading to major discoveries that benefited both Cairn and India. This case exemplifies the incredible value of revisiting and reinterpreting old data. Scepticism about reconstructed seismic often stems from past experiences with subpar implementations, particularly when a primitive software application fails to capture the full dynamic range of the data. This occurs with algorithms designed to only detect the positive-going, infilled peaks, ignoring the wiggle part of the trace. Ensuring your contractor uses full-waveform tracking technology is crucial for obtaining high-quality, reliable results. On the legal front, the counter-intuitive status of vectorised data might surprise some. Once vectorised, the SEG-Y output is legally yours, as it is considered a new creation distinct from the original data. In my experience, there has never been a serious or successful legal challenge to this. The series of numbers that constitute the output file resemble those of the original plot file only by statistical co-incidence. When plotted it may look precisely the same as the scanned section image, but legally it is something completely different. Vectorised data offers a cost-effective solution with vast potential for reconnaissance, planning new surveys, and even guiding decisions on purchasing new multi-client data. As Richard aptly notes, there's immense value in maximizing what we already have. Let's continue to explore and harness this powerful technology.
"Before any fancy workflows can be applied to digital seismic data, it first needs to be available in a digital format. And there is a lot of seismic data that is only available on paper, because digital records have either been lost or deteriorated to a point they can not be read any more." Today, Richard Taylor from Petroscan Limited writes about vectorising seismic data. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eDjzAuiT
