Seismic shift

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Bob Heath, product manager at Ascend Geo, addresses the accelerating acceptance of cable-free land seismic instrumentation.

Some astonishing things have been happening in land seismic instrumentation in the two years since the last GEO Convention in Bahrain.

I am not referring to any particular technical developments, even though there have surely been those.

I refer instead to the almost sudden and now definitely accelerating acceptance of modern cable-free land acquisition systems, of which there are already about a half a dozen on the market.

Another thing that is amazing is that some of these products are not really that new anymore, at least not in terms of the philosophy of how they function.

One such operational "new era" cable-free system has an odyssey of development going back to 2001 and is actually in its third generation of hardware to have worked in the field, quietly beavering away, finding out how to enhance and perfect cable-free systems and operations.

A different cable-free system was announced almost two and half years ago, and has hardly been out of the limelight since. So how come it has only been only relatively recently that red carpet has more readily been rolled out for this technology?

The reasons are not too difficult to understand. Seismic contractors are some of the most conservative organisations on the planet.

They find hardware that works for them along with a method of operating, and stick with it.

Additionally, aided and abetted by attitudes of a few oil companies that can also occasionally veer towards the uninventive, there may be little top-down pressure on contractors to make radical changes, so the status tends very much to stay quo-ed.

The status that prevailed for so long prior to the acceptance of new era cable-free was the use of digital cable-based systems for land acquisition.

For those familiar with the way some occasions are celebrated in the west, the introduction of such technology will enjoy its "Pearl Anniversary" (thirty years) in 2009 according to my calculations.

Over the course of these three cable-dominating decades, one manufacturer alone has brought out five generations of cable-connected hardware, some of which enjoyed backwards compatibility with earlier products, and some that did not. But in either case - not a bad run for its money.

The chances are that almost no one under the age of 50 who has ever worked in land seismic has seen, or maybe even thought about, any other way to shoot land surveys but the digital cable way.

But there's the rub - few technologies enjoy an unbroken run lasting close to one third of a century. While products often change on the outside, basic theory was always going to show that inside, digital telemetry hardware was one day going to hit various technological buffers when pushed out of its comfort zone.

And it was probably the sudden sight of these on-coming buffers that has made so many realise that land exploration is not going to make any more major leaps without a switch of technology.

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