April 17th, 2013
OptaSense wins E&P – Special Meritorious Award for Engineering Innovation in Geosciences
OptaSense has today announced it has won the 2013 Special Meritorious Award for Engineering Innovation, in the Geosciences category of the prestigious E&P awards. OptaSense was selected for the award for its game-changing Vertical Seismic Profiling tool (VSP). The VSP tool was judged to have the potential to improve efficiency and safety, as well as improving profitability of the oilfield.
OptaSense’s ground-breaking VSP solution was released commercially this year and uses fibre-optic cable to image wells that were previously inaccessible to conventional geophone arrays.
Magnus McEwen-King, CEO of OptaSense, commented: “I am particularly pleased that our technical development teams have been recognised as delivering world class technical innovation. I would specifically like to recognise the input of Shell in working together to develop, test and commercially deliver the OptaSense VSP service and their commitment to innovation through collaboration.
“The OptaSense VSP service delivers outstanding business value in not only the data collected, by enabling the entire wellbore to be imaged simultaneously, but also in the real-time delivery of VSP data from the field.”
OptaSense VSP uses permanently installed optical fibre to make measurements in producer or injector wells which are not possible to measure with geophone arrays, either because they are too hot, highly deviated or difficult to access.
Dr David Hill, CTO of OptaSense explains “OptaSense enables gapless coverage along the entire length of the wellbore with many hundreds of channels and we able to take measurements in places and on a scale not seen before. For example High temperature wells, in excess of 300 DegC and over 40,000 PSI, such as those used for steam injection, can now be imaged for the first time. In a recent technical first, OptaSense VSP was used to perform a 3D VSP in a 50,000 shot offshore programme lasting 6 weeks. The data was collected on two wells and resulted in over 70 million seismic records and should lead to an unprecedented understanding of the reservoir.”
Dr David Hill will also be co-presenting with Shell the latest DAS and VSP research at the EAGE Borehole Geophysics workshop being held in Malta from 21 April to 24 April. The session will explain how DAS works, and demonstrate its usability for typical VSP applications such as checkshots, imaging, and time-lapse monitoring.
