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Drilling for oil is an expensive gamble: With project costs rising every year, an oil company can
stand to lose an incredible amount of money exploring or developing a property that fails to yield
hydrocarbons in commercial rates. When faced with these risks, companies do all they can to
hedge their bets, to be as sure as possible that their investment has a good chance of making
money. Companies want to know as much as possible about the potential profitability of a
property before they begin developing it, and seismic surveys are one of the primary ways they
learn about a prospects production potential.
In essence, seismic surveys are a way to probe beneath the surface to "see" underlying
features that make up the underground structure of a prospect. Such features can give
companies a more astute indication if a prospect contains hydrocarbons.
"In addition to delineating subsurface structures, seismic data can be computer processed for
'attributes' such as Amplitude Versus Offset, or AVO, which can serve as a Direct Hydrocarbon
Indicator (DHI)," said Carl Lothringer, a petroleum geologist at St. Mary Land and Exploration.
AVO shows the lithology and fluid content variations in rocks, allowing geologists to model other
fluid contents. "Such DHIs are as close to directly identifying oil or gas in the subsurface as
geophysicists can get."
Dynamite is the simpler and generally preferred source, but for several reasons it is limited to
open areas, such as fieldsand farmlands. Dynamite is also the only practical energy source in
swampy areas, such as much of Southern Louisiana. Quite simply, dynamite is buried and then
set off. The resulting explosions generate the requisite underground reverberation, which is then
relayed via geophones to a special recording truck.
The other common method, more frequently seen in populous areas or places in which
dynamite is impractical, is vibroseis. Vibroseis uses large, purpose-built trucks as the source of
the seismic waves. Five or six trucks are commonly used to create enough energy for the
procedure. Simultaneously, these trucks then begin to generate energy of increasing frequency
over the period of several seconds. Like with the dynamite method, the resulting reverberations
are measured by geophones, with the data being sent to a recording truck.
The rough signal is then filtered and processed to edit out background noise and produce a
clean, sharp final signal.