A Step Change in Seismic Imaging Quality in Western Desert of Egypt - An Acquisition Case Study

Land Seismic value has drastically improved with the addition of two key ingredients at the acquisition stage which have significantly increased the geophysical information captured in the seismic recordings. The first one, on the seismic source side, corresponds to the broadening of the seismic bandwidth with the addition of at least two octaves at the low frequency side of the spectrum, thanks to advances in seismic vibrator technology. These additional low frequencies reveal deep structures which were not possible to observe before and lead to sharper and more stable seismic wavelets which are more suitable for reservoir characterization applications.

The second one is related to higher signal-to-noise ratios achieved through denser data acquisition. This was made possible by the development of cost-effective high productivity acquisition solutions allowing a dramatic increase in the number of measurements that can be produced per day using a given set of equipment. This communication aims to review notions like seismic bandwidth and octaves, subsurface reflectivity and impedance imaging, for a good understanding of the value these new developments bring to the knowledge of the subsurface. This will be illustrated with a recent case study from the Western Desert of Egypt