Building a national resource offshore Brazil
CGG has been present in Brazil for over 55 years, since the company began working with Petrobras in 1961. Its long-established Rio de Janeiro Subsurface Imaging Center, with its strong reservoir characterisation group, has the largest computer capacity and greatest expertise in the region.
In 2010, CGG also opened a technology centre in Rio with a world-class R&D team, working with Petrobras and other local agencies to focus on solving local geoscience challenges. The company’s commitment to Brazil is demonstrated by its investment in over 170 000 km² of 3D multi-client seismic data offshore, which it continues to upgrade and increase.
Currently, CGG is spending considerable time and effort in the pre-salt area, reprocessing its conventional 3D surveys with the latest technology, including 3D deghosted broadband processing and TTI (tilted transverse isotropy) FWI (full-waveform inversion) velocity model building, to upgrade them with its latest processing and imaging advances. It is also acquiring new BroadSeis™ surveys to fill the gaps and create a contiguous volume of over 80 000 km² of state-of-the-art seismic data, bridging the Santos and Campos Basins to cover the entire pre-salt area.
The first stage of this reprocessing, the Galaxy project covering approximately 34 000 km², delivered grids of 3D migrated images, extracted from CGG’s Cluster and Cluster Extension surveys, for a quick evaluation of the Santos Basin in advance of the licensing rounds. This was a precursor to the ongoing 23 750 km² Constellation project, which will apply improvements in subsurface imaging achieved over the past decade to these legacy data sets and bring new insight into the Lula, Peroba and Pau Brasil fields.