An Evaluation of Pre-stack Broadband Processing Technologies Offshore Namibia

As the signal to noise response of conventional acquisition systems has improved, vendors have developed technologies aimed at using signal processing to mitigate the effects of the source and receiver ghosts. In 2012, a 3D exploration survey with 9m receiver tow depth and a single repeat sail-line using an 18m receiver tow depth was acquired offshore Namibia by Polarcus on behalf of Serica Energy and their coventurers, BP and NAMCOR. BP asked three vendors to process the 18m tow repeat sail-line and the nearest shot line extracted from the 9m tow dataset with both their conventional and pre-stack broadband processing sequences. In this paper we evaluate the results. All the vendor broadband workflows were successful in recovering signal in the receiver notches, and the resulting datasets all showed an increase in bandwidth. However, the evaluation also revealed large differences in phase behaviour between the vendors’ results, underlining the importance of phase corrections when broadband processing.