Marmot is permanently breaking new ground on advanced monitoring technologies. Since our recent discussion with the community about this kind of passive technologies a lot of things have happened in the energy industry.
Nuclear energy is going to shut down and nobody knows where transport energy will come from in near future.
As reaction of our publication about the role of “Passive Seismic” in first break, the EAGE publication in July 2010 we had a lot of interesting discussions with several experts worldwide and the protagonists of the “active seismic community” especially. For this reason I assume it is worthwhile again to strengthen the information and discussion about passive monitoring technologies and its application:
There is a fundamental difference between “Active Seismic” and “Passive Seismic” and this is the information character.
The solution for future enhanced oil recovery and the solution for Non Structural Problems (NSP) need new and advanced technologies for the identification of targets and those technologies have to use a powerful and omnipresent broadband source to gain more information as we had before with traditional or/and conventional methods. Or frankly speaking: These methods MUST be passive.
This does NOT mean that conventional reflection seismic is no more used and it does NOT mean that any other conventional measurement and information tool is obsolete – however it means that we need more information which can only be achieved using broadband information tools with a broadband source. And we need more measured data and less modeled data.
Marmot’s development team is presenting solutions and we are focusing on the solutions for Non Structural Problems (NSP) and these are the key problems arising for oil production in future – as there are:
- A producing oil field is an imbalanced dynamic system which immediately becomes a Non Structural Problem as soon as production has commenced and from that point on all “Red Neck Power” is fruitless because the “Entropy” of dynamic systems has taken over command and as a result the recovery factor of most of the large producing fields is less than 28%.
- Abandoned fields are plenty in this world and they contain still more oil than it was produced before: At the present situation of energy demand and fossil energy production policy it is a must to revitalize abandoned fields. But here is a problem and this is a Non Structural Problem: Marmot can solve it because IPMT/IPDS is detecting residual oil pockets and no structures which are known anyway.
- Non Structural Traps (NST) in the large areas of unexplored basins worldwide and also in the wide areas of Rub El Khali, the Taoudeni Basin, the Volta Basin and all North Africa where possibly Non Structural traps are bearing much more fossil resources than conventional traps.
Please do not hesitate to ask us for more detailed information about passive monitoring, 5D Monitor or just “Time Variant Visualization of Reservoir Dynamics” and about abandoned fields and Non Structural Problems (NSP).
Ernst D. (Paul) Rode
President