OREANDA-NEWS. Two global companies to collaborate on R&D to take offshore industry's subsea imaging capability to the next level.

BP and CGG today announced an agreement for collaborative research and development in the field of new types of marine vibratory seismic sources. The agreement combines the companies' research efforts and expertise to develop and deploy innovative seismic source technology, and builds on successful prototype trials.

Seismic surveys have for decades been the exploration industry's key tool for identifying oil- and gas-bearing rocks below the seabed. And both BP and CGG recognize the significant potential for new vibratory seismic sources to improve technical performance, while maintaining a focus on environmental sensitivity.

"BP has an established track record of innovation and industry leadership in the area of seismic acquisition, which plays to our notable strengths in exploration and resource progression," said Eric Green, Vice President Advanced Seismic Imaging Technology at BP. "This agreement highlights BP's ongoing commitment to remaining at the forefront of this important field. We welcome this exciting opportunity to cooperate on novel marine source technology with CGG."

Thierry Brizard, Executive Vice President, Technology, CGG, said: "Historically, CGG has consistently taken the lead in the development and implementation of new technological advances for seismic acquisition. Recent examples are our BroadSeis-BroadSource technology for true broadband marine seismic imaging and our Sercel 508XT, which sets the new standard for onshore MegaCrew acquisition. We look forward to joining forces with BP to develop new seismic source technology that will have a profound impact on the future of the seismic industry."

BP invented and was the first company to deploy wide-azimuth towed-streamer (WATS) technology to better illuminate and image below complex structures like salt.

BP developed independent simultaneous source (ISS®) acquisition technology whereby seismic sources operate independently of each other and interference between their signals is removed later by advanced processing. This enables coverage of much larger areas more quickly, reducing survey costs.

BP has invested in the Centre for High Performance Computing in Houston. It is the world's largest computing centre dedicated to commercial research and has processing capacity measured in petaflops (one thousand trillion calculations per second). It enables BP to do complex modelling of the geological formations below the surface, develop advanced algorithms to improve the understanding of hydrocarbon-bearing reservoirs, and develop new acquisition technologies and survey designs that help see the subsurface more clearly.