The Brazilian Geophysical Society (SBGf) is organizing in 2010 a Forum to focus discussions on the application of non-seismic methods for Oil and Gas Exploration.

Modern geophysics was born with non-seismic methods when Conrad Schlumberger conceived the revolutionary idea of using electrical measurements to map subsurface rock bodies in 1912.

After almost a century the non-seismic methods are still revolutionary on the geophysical world bringing new ideas and methods for the exploration of natural resources.

Present days, the oil industry emphasizes the use of geophysical techniques because of their minimum impact to the environment. By having in mind that the large reservoirs are hard to discover and expensive to develop the industry is searching for new technologies which are able to provide valuable information for the exploration and production of these areas in an efficient and more cost-effective way. We hope to have examples from offshore and onshore applications of the non-seismic methods from South America, Gulf of Mexico, North Sea, Middle East, Russia and other important oil producers worldwide.

The Organizing Committee expects to receive 150 delegates from Brazil and abroad. Participants will include geophysicists and exploration specialists within the oil and gas industry.

The forum provides an opportunity to explore the application of non-seismic methods and areas where they’ve proven to be successful in oil and gas exploration. Forum organizers have invited geoscientists to share their ideas and experiences by submitting presentations on the topics of Potential Fields Methods, Electric and Electromagnetic Methods and Borehole Geophysics.

While no oil and gas discoveries are made without the use of seismic methods, other geophysical methods can contribute to more reliable evaluations in deeper, more challenging environments, such as subsalt structures and deep sea environments. By cost-effectively gathering geophysical data to narrow the search area within large fields, oil and gas explorers can refine their targets and apply seismic techniques more productively.

Geosoft Among Participants of SBGf Forum on Non-Seismic Methods

“The SBGf chose to focus on non-seismic methods for its 2010 forum because of increasing interest and success in the use of other geophysical methods within oil exploration,” says Ana Cristina Chaves, Managing Director, Geosoft Latinoamerica, and a member of the SBGf forum organizing committee. “In recent years, potential field geophysics has played a role in significant discoveries in the subsalt structures of offshore Brazil and the Gulf of Mexico. With deeper exploration, there are also greater environmental concerns and geophysical techniques that have less impact on the environment are favoured over more invasive methods. As a result, we’ve seen major oil and gas companies expanding or starting new gravity and magnetic programs.”

“The degree of complexity within Oil and Gas exploration today is driving a resurgence of gravity and magnetic methods,” said Jorge Hildenbrand, Managing Director of Fugro Airborne Surveys in Brazil and a member of the SBGf committee organizing the forum. “There are many environments where seismic does not respond well, such as salt domes and volcanic horizons, and geophysical potential field data, properly modeled, reduces the uncertainty caused by non-homogeneous lithologies. Potential field methods, including airborne gravity gradiometry, and the application of electromagnetic methods (both marine and ground) are showing a lot of promise, and the forum will provide an opportunity to share case studies on how they are being applied in the field.”

Robert Ellis, Geosoft Senior Scientist, Earth Modelling, will present a paper on Non-Uniqueness in Potential Field Data with application to the Bacia Portiguar at the forum. Exploration relies heavily on using geophysical observations to aid in building a model of the Earth’s subsurface, and Ellis will explore how this is achieved by solving a geophysical inverse problem that recovers a causative physical property model from its geophysical response.

http://www.geocomm.com/

A joint project of the University of Western Australia (UWA) and Geosoft, supported by Barrick Gold, has created new CET grid analysis software which can help explorers improve their interpretations.

“The most relevant application to date has been on airborne gravity data in the Lake Victoria Goldfields to assist in mapping dislocations and gradient changes commonly associated with greenstone gold deposits,” said Matthew Hope, Barrick’s project geophysicist for Africa/Eurasia.
It is the identification and mapping of these features that makes the new CET grid analysis tool so useful to explorers. The modules are essentially automatic interpretation tools that provide a first pass lineament detection on gridded/image data.

The clever and sophisticated algorithms behind these tools were created by the Geophysics and Image Analysis Group of The University of Western Australia (UWA)’s Centre for Exploration Targeting (CET), part of the University’s School of Earth and Environment. The group is supported through a partnership between UWA, Curtin University of Technology and the mineral exploration industry. Since 2006, the team has been focusing on developing new techniques to enhance and automatically detect features of interest from geoscientific datasets.
While the UWA team are clearly the mathematical theorists behind the initiative, creation of the new modules was a joint effort with partners Barrick and Geosoft.

In the CET group at UWA, Associate Professor Eun-Jung Holden teamed up with Professor Mike Dentith and Dr Peter Kovesi to develop the methodology used for the software. In 2009 when the project hit its stride, Holden coordinated and led the team, assisted by research associate Shih Ching Fu, to develop the software.
Holden explained the outcome and the three basics of what the mathematical processes do:
“The algorithms provide methods to enhance local discontinuities within data by analysing local textures; to locate laterally continuous regions of discontinuity by finding texturally complex line features or finding data edges; and to vectorise the axes of resulting discontinuity regions,” she said.
Holden said the base algorithms are well-established methods in the computer vision community, some of which had been developed by team member Dr Peter Kovesi.
“These algorithms are combined and adapted for geophysical processing in CET grid analysis,” she said.
The software provides generic tools that are broadly applicable. Barrick’s Bourne believes the new software will find use in most exploration situations with potential field or other image analysis requirements.
“It is not a standalone tool but a supplement to traditional image outputs,” he said.
“The efficiency of the CET grid analysis tools is one of its major strengths. From a user perspective the code is relatively easy to understand and quick to run. Several iterations can be achieved in short periods of time on most potential field datasets.”
UWA’s Holden says the new processes have only become possible more recently.
“A main challenge in developing geophysical image processing tools is in dealing with the size and scale of the data while preserving a reasonable execution time,” she said.
“Often geophysical datasets are larger than datasets used in other fields, and clients do not have access to high powered hardware.”

How the new algorithms work their magic
The CET Grid Analysis software provides tools for grid texture analysis, lineament detection, edge detection, and thresholding to coax out trends from geophysics datasets and facilitates the following:
1. Texture analysis-based image enhancement: by highlighting local intensity variations, this method enhances regions of discontinuity within aeromagnetic/gravity datasets. Regions of magnetic/gravity discontinuity correspond with, and can reveal, lithological boundaries, faults and dykes critical to understanding an area’s geology.
2. Discontinuity structure detection: takes the texture analysis output and finds the skeletal structure of the regions of the magnetic/gravity discontinuity. The output is a set of a binary skeletal line segments that belong to each of the discontinuity regions, clearly showing the changes of orientations and offsets within the structures. This process emulates the traditional manual drawing of interpretive lines along the discontinuity region.
The algorithms will be useful in exploring for most kinds of mineral deposits, in particular gold and base metal mineralization.

Paula Wallace — created Jul 14, 2010

Australian Journal of Mining

The survey was initiated by Professor Siyan Malomo, Director General of the NGSA, and it was conducted in two phases. Phase 1 was financed entirely by the Government of Nigeria. All of the airborne geophysical work – data acquisition, processing and interpretation, was carried out by Fugro Airborne Surveys. Phase 1 was completed in September 2007 and included 826,000 line-km of magnetic and radiometric surveys flown at 500 m line spacing and 80 m terrain clearance; and 24,000 line-km of time-domain electromagnetics surveys flown at 500 m line spacing and 80 m terrain clearance using the TEM PEST system. Phase 2, completed August 2009, surveyed blocks not covered in Phase 1. It included 1,104,000 line-km of magnetic and radiometric surveys flown at 500 m line spacing and 80 m terrain clearance. These levels of survey are intensive: often a total of seven aircraft of three different types were active at one time.

Some details and maps in the presentation:

http://www.mmsd.gov.ng/Downloads/Fugro_Phase_1_Nigeria_Interpretation_Presentation.pdf

Geosoft has been named to this year’s Branham300, a listing of the top revenue performers in Canada’s information technology industry. The company ranked 160 in the top 250 Canadian IT companies. The list is compiled annually by leading industry analyst firm Branham Group. This is the 10th consecutive year that Geosoft has ranked in the Branham300.

Branham Group is a leading industry analyst and strategic consulting firm servicing the global information technology marketplace. For 17 years, Branham 300 has highlighted the top Canadian IT companies in its annual listing. Included in the listing are Canadian software companies and multinational world leaders, such as IBM, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Oracle.

“Our stability and consistent growth is a strong reflection of the customer relationships we’ve been able to foster over the past 24 years,” said Tim Dobush, CEO, Geosoft. “Geosoft software and solutions are used extensively within exploration industries and the geosciences to distill knowledge from large volumes of data and support critical decision making.”

Aaron Balasch (Sky Hunter Exploration Ltd.)  has represented GridHist.GX for Geosoft:

See “GX corner”

Aaron Balasch (Sky Hunter Exploration) has renewed some gxs and added source codes (trendsmooth, arrow, dumrep, reverse).

Geosoft announced today the availability of its 2010 Software Release for geoscientists and exploration professionals. The release includes a number of important advancements that improve access to data and information, make mapping and reporting tasks more efficient, and expand 3D subsurface capabilities. New capabilities, in the 2010 release, support generalists and specialists working across all disciplines – geology, geophysics and geochemistry. Enhancements have been made to several geophysical extensions.  These include the addition of section support for crooked sections within montaj Geophysics; a new Gridfill Multistep algorithm option within MAGMAP; and the availability of Draped surface calculations within the GMSYS 3D gravity modelling extension. Data support has been added for ODBC, JPEG 2000 and GOCAD voxet data files. ODBC support now includes a new filtering capability, for accessing drill hole databases or surface data without the requirement for SQL query knowledge.

“There are three key themes that have guided our software development effort. They are: ease of use, improving data accessibility and advancing 3D subsurface capabilities. All three are aimed at improving your overall experience with Geosoft software, with an emphasis on making the existing capabilities more accessible and supporting your ability to explore data more effectively within an integrated environment.”

When will the 2010 Software Release be available?

What is Geosoft doing to improve workflows within the software?

Full interview with Louis Racic, Geosoft Product Management Director read here : http://www.geosoft.com/support/Louis_Racic_interview_01_29_10.asp

GEOSOFT continues to produce video lessons for their users and leaners.

Some of the video materials are specially for geophysicists: Geophysics: What’s new in 7.1;  Scripting in Oasis montaj; Math Expressions..

And the live Webinar “Integrating Gravity and Magnetic Data into your Geophysical Portfolio” is going to be.