SurvOPT Survey Types

SurvOPT can be used help to plan and optimize all types streamer seismic: 2D, 3D, 4D, MAZ, WAZ and Coil.

SurvOPT can also be used to plan and optimize source boat operations on nodal and OBC surveys.

SurvOPT is useful at every stage of the survey project, from initial design appraisals and polygon design to mopping up the last few lines.

Have a read of 50 Questions for contractors to see how SurvOPT can increase your profitability, or 50 questions for energy companies to see how SurvOPT can help you meet your imaging objectives more cost effectively.

SurvOPT for 2D Surveys

In a conventional 2D survey with just 40 lines, there are 9 x 10⁵⁹ possible routes!
It’s effectively impossible to find an efficient route by hand.
SurvOPT finds efficient 2D shooting schedules that reduce line change time by as much as 10%.

A client asked us to prove SurvOPT’s effectiveness in reducing survey duration by studying a small, 2D survey they’d just completed. We showed that SurvOPT would have reduced line change duration from about 61 hours down to 56 hours, a reduction of over 8%. SurvOPT would have also helped avoid a circle due to high SOL feather.

SurvOPT also helps in many other ways, like planning maintenance, crew changes, obstruction planning, shooting into tidal shallows and reporting.
Over the past 7 years, SurvOPT has been successfully used on hundreds of 2D surveys.

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SurvOPT for 3D Surveys

As with 2D Surveys, there are a huge number of ways of shooting a 3D survey. Even if you shoot in regular swathes over a rectangular survey, it’s quite hard to choose an efficient pattern. As soon as the polygon becomes irregular, or obstructions are added, it becomes effectively impossible.

SurvOPT finds effective shooting plans even on irregular surveys with multiple obstructions. You can allow for almost any real world constraint like line priority, shooting direction, scheduled crew changes, port calls, currents and feather.

SurvOPT is easy to keep up to date as the survey is completed, and helps you quickly replan when equipment fails or the weather turns bad.

SurvOPT is used by all the major contractors to help plan, bid and acquire hundreds of 3D surveys each year, and an increasing number of energy companies to plan, budget and review their survey programs.

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SurvOPT for 4D Surveys

Although SurvOPT isn’t specifically designed for 4D surveys, you can use SurvOPT to optimize repeatability if you have accurate current predictions and a certain amount of patience.

We’re currently developing SurvOPT 4D that will automate this process, and require less patience.

SurvOPT includes a feature called “environment constraints”. If you add appropriate feather or current constraints to each line in the survey, SurvOPT will find efficient ways of completing the survey while minimizing the amount of time you have to wait around for conditions to suit each line.

Of course, you can continue to use all of SurvOPT’s other useful features on 4D surveys, too.

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SurvOPT for MAZ

SurvOPT is designed to be used for single vessel multi azimuth surveys. In fact SurvOPT was used to help design some of the very first multi azimuth surveys.

The SurvOPT search is already designed to optimize MAZ surveys and you won’t need to make any special adjustments. SurvOPT will find neat ways to take advantage of the orientation of the lines and minimize line change time.

As with conventional surveys, you can add obstructions, change the priority of individual lines or swathes, or an entire azimuth, as well as specify lines be acquired as a group or in a particular direction.

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SurvOPT for WAZ

Although SurvOPT is not specifically designed for multi vessel Wide Azimuth Surveys, it can still be of assistance, particularly on surveys where there is only one streamer vessel.

We’re currently developing SurvOPT WAZ to optimize and simulate multi vessel operations but in the meantime there’s still many ways of using “Normal” SurvOPT on multi vessel WAZ projects.

As the streamer vessel is much slower and less manoeuvrable than the source vessels, it is usually the constraining factor in trying to minimize line change duration. Assuming the source vessels are able to avoid the streamer vessel during line changes, optimizing its path using SurvOPT’s normal search engine can significantly reduce survey duration. You can also use SurvOPT’s wide array of features to help plan for all the real world problems like crew changes, port calls, maintenance, obstructions, tides and currents.

SurvOPT for Circular Shooting

We are proud to announce two new applications: SurvOPT Coil and QuickPLOT Coil, to help design and optimize coil surveys. You can read about them here.