New advances in simultaneous-source seismic acquisition

Abstract:

Simultaneous-source shooting can help acquire better seismic data with tremendously lower acquisition cost, and thus has attracted much attention from the industry in the past several years. Separation of blended sources into individual sources, also known as deblending, and direct imaging of the blended data, without the need of deblending, are two main ways to deal with the blended data. I review the reported success in the simultaneous-source seismic acquisition together with existing problems that hinder the wide application of this new technique in field. I propose multiple ways to deal with such problems in order to make the simultaneous-source technique easier to use. The new developments include 1) special types of median filters tailored for attenuating the spiky blending noise in the seismic data in order to accelerate the source-separation process; 2) more constraints applied during the inversion process in order to better regularize the under-determined inverse problem; 3) more advanced shot scheduling techniques that make the blended simultaneous-source data easier for separation; 4) more detailed and sophisticated deblending implementations to obtain the optimal source-separation performance; 5) more robust direct imaging algorithms for obtaining artifacts-free seismic images. The new developments are all tested via either complex synthetic examples or field data examples.