oa How High Can We Go? Pushing Limits of Lateral and Vertical Resolution in Deepwater Seismic

We acquired low-cost high-resolution 3D (HR3D) streamer seismic surveys using the P-Cable system with a small air-gun source array (300 in3) over deepwater fields with water depths ranging from 900m to 3000 m. The P-Cable HR3D streamer system employs multiple short streamers (100 m) connected to a cross-cable. In our surveys we deployed 18 streamer cables with each of the 100 m streamer cables having 16 hydrophone groups spaced at 6.25 m intervals. With shot intervals spaced every 12.5 m, the nominal bin size of this configuration is 6.25 m × 3.125 m and the fold is four. In the Shallow sections, we achieved migrated images with frequencies up to 200 Hz. The lateral resolution of the images is found to be superior to that from high-resolution processing of conventional data (streamer and OBN). In the deeper section, the frequencies dropped to much lower values indicating that the earth has more control on the high frequency end than the geophysicist.