3-D Land Seismic Acquisition in Saudi Arabia

Between 1991 and 1996, Saudi Aramco has acquired more than 8,500 square kilometers of 3-D seismic data in Saudi Arabia. During this time, a universal approach to 3-D acquisition has been developed. The resulting acquisition schemes use a dense source point grid with a low sweep effort per source point, and a high number of recorded channels distributed over a large surface aperture. This sampling strategy results in high fold data. Cost-effectiveness is achieved by ensuring that the source and receiver effort are balanced. Comparisons have shown that increases in surface aperture and fold, cross-line fold in particular, improve the data quality significantly at a marginal increase in cost. The cost per unit of data is made significantly lower even if the cost per unit of time may increase.