OPINION: Uncertainty, even mild confusion, reigns among the geoscience players that serve the oil and gas industry.

That was clear from last week’s European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers (EAGE) annual conference in London, where the focus was primarily on seismic technology and operations.

Given the hammering that the seismic business has taken over the past five years, the turnout of around 6000 people was respectable — not much less than the last time the event was held in London, in 2013, when the industry was in much better shape.

Those attending this time around were doubtless anxious to determine what the future holds after a period of unprecedented turmoil.

A big clue could be found in the exhibition area, where many of the traditional suppliers of equipment and services were either in less extravagant booth spaces, or simply not there at all.

Making up the numbers was a raft of companies with solutions based on the new digitalisation wave.

Seismic companies, like the rest of the oil industry, have been somewhat late to the world of big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence and cloud-based computing, for an understandable reason.

The processing and interpretation of 3D and multi-component subsurface seismic data has always been heavily computer-based, so there has been a natural suspicion of “breakthroughs” that in reality simply re-label existing solutions.

Now, however, the dam has broken. The potential benefits of the Cloud for the storage, management and manipulation of data to speed up the time from seismic data acquisition to drilling decision-making are recognised as the way forward.

In fact, the whole business is devoting more attention to the value that can be extracted from acquired seismic data to help oil companies understand their subsurface assets quicker.

Leading the charge has been Schlumberger. In January 2018 the company disposed of its substantial but unprofitable marine and land acquisition operations managed by its WesternGeco division to focus on the so-called ‘asset-light’ model successfully exploited by TGS.

This means the company owns no vessels or land equipment and looks to collect future data by commissioning multi-client surveys from the remaining marine and land seismic acquisition contractors worldwide.

Its core activity now is to extract maximum value from seismic data for its oil company clients and it intends to do this by leveraging the potential of new digital thinking advocated by the company’s leadership.

At the London meeting, CGG announced completion of its exit from marine seismic to pursue the same multi-client strategy. Shearwater Geoservices, the best-bankrolled of the few remaining vessel operators, is to buy CGG’s five remaining high-end streamer vessels.

The talk in London was whether this consolidation in an increasingly commoditised market would be beneficial and how rivals PGS and Polarcus, both with financial challenges, would fare. The effect of increased competition for multi-client survey business was also a source of speculation.

The EAGE conference also had to contend with the likely impact of the “energy transition” and how this would affect the nature and relevance of geoscience.

All in all, plenty of food for thought for seismic participants.

(This is an Upstream opinion article.)

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OPINION: Seismic players get with the programme