Technology GEONOD: Status and Prospects of Automation and Control

Seismic prospecting is one of the crucial components for an effective use of oil and gas fields on offshore. Since the costs of drilling a well on the shelf is hundreds of times more expensive than drilling a well on land, preliminary marine seismic exploration can help avoid unnecessary costs. High quality data of marine seismic surveys can only be obtained from bottom technologies: special bottom stations are lowered into the investigated area of the seabed. These bottom stations collecting direct and reflected acoustic signals (generated on the surface by an acoustic radiator) from the seabed. After all data is recorded, bottom stations are lifted to the surface, the recorded data is downloaded for subsequent interpretation. As a result, based on the obtained data, a 2D or 3D detailed map of the potential oil and gas deposits is complied. The resulting maps are used to determine the exact coordinates of the installation of drilling stations. The most common technology of marine seismic exploration is the use of bottom stations on a halyard rope. First development of this technology began in the 1970s and did not assume the means of automation work with bottom stations. All operations of removal and attachment of rope to station, diving and lifting stations, as well as a number of other operations were performed manually. Nowadays, there has not been any automation in working with stations on the halyard rope. In addition, the use of halyard rope has a number of disadvantages such as: Hooking of halyard rope for obstacles on the sea bottom; The breakage of the halyard rope; The need to have additional space on the vessel to store the halyard rope and all accessories, which leads to the use of larger vessels that can not operate at shallow depths; The halyard rope that is connected to the bottom stations generates a seismic noise, which degrades the quality of the received data; Impossible to conduct seismic prospecting in places with high shipping traffic. Developed over the past few years, a new Russian technology of marine seismic exploration GEONOD allows us easily solve many of mentioned problems. Many of these problems do not rise at all, since the GEONODE technology does not use halyards, and the work is carried out by the autonomous self-popup bottom stations (ASDS). In this paper a number of problems on applied mechanics and control in connection with technology GEONOD are considering.

technology of seismic prospecting, hydrocarbons, sea shelf, autonomous self-popup bottom stations

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