The objective of the survey is to support prospect de-risking through PP and PS analysis – a novel, cost-efficient methodology developed by the geoscience team in Aker BP – providing additional insight into the subsurface and helping assess the potential presence of hydrocarbons before a drilling decision is made.

The operation brought together several technologies in a highly integrated setup. A total of 200 Seisnodes were deployed along a 2D line across the prospect – half deployed and recovered by ROV, and the other half using Allton’s new A1 autonomous deployment system.

The ROV operations delivered by DeepOcean proved highly efficient, both during deployment and recovery, and Seisnode proved its operational benefits with a significant number of nodes per ROV run, without any specialized engineering and ROV skid solutions. The A1 system also demonstrated impressive deepwater deployment performance, with nodes landing very close to their pre-plot positions. As can be expected when introducing new technology offshore, there were some operational learnings along the way.

To further optimize the acquisition setup, the seismic source was operated from the same vessel – bringing ROV operations, autonomous deployment node handling and source operations together on a single platform.

With many individual components and technologies working together, this was a complex operation – and an important demonstration of how flexible OBN concepts can be used for targeted prospect de-risking in deep water.

Data has now been successfully downloaded from all the Seisnodes and delivered to the imaging centre for further processing, PP/PS analysis and interpretation.

The next exciting question is: Do the data indicate hydrocarbons – and is the prospect worth drilling?
We look forward to finding out.

A big thank you to Aker BP ASA, Allton, the vessel crew and everyone involved for the collaboration and effort in successfully completing this project.