Spectator schreef op 30 juni 2021 00:31:
[...]
Hey @ff_relativeren, ik heb het een paar dagen geleden al gepost dat PGS is geen concurrent van Fugro. It is a bit difficult for me to explain this in Dutch, so I will temporarily switch to English, hope you can follow ;-)
There are different kinds of seismic surveys:
1) Oil&Gas exploration&development seismic: conventional reflection seismic surveys which are used to create subsurface models, typically for depths from 500m to 3000-5000m, in order to map oil&gas reservoirs, plan exploration and production wells, etc, those are nowadays almost always 3D (in comparison to the past when it was mostly 2D). Also if you already have 3D seismic over an oil&gas field that was in production for some years, you can acquire another 3D over the same area which will make it 4D because you can see the difference between the first and the second surveys, and can tell where you could drill additional wells to produce more hydrocarbons.
2) Engineering seismic: Various shallow seismic methods, both reflection and refraction methods, to create subsurface models, typically for depths from 0 to a few 100 meters, in order to map the seabottom and shallow anomalies that are potential risks for construction work (think of active faults, man-made tunnels or natural holes like karst, or just “weak” uncemented sediments), or risks for drilling (think of shallow gas deposits), etc.
So, PGS (and also CGG and PX Geo) is only doing the first kind, while Fugro is only doing the second kind (Fugro exited conventional seismic for oil&gas exploration and development in 2013 by selling those assets to CGG). The thing is everything is different between those two kinds of surveys: from seismic equipment to data processing and interpretation methods, but also software packages and even geophysicists are different (they don’t know how to do each other’s jobs). The common thing is that both are called seismic surveys (which means waves traveling through the earth). Also, another big difference is that conventional seismic is much more high-tech, therefore also much more expensive, there have been huge, often unprofitable investments in it in the past 10-20 years (think of Schlumberger exiting conventional seismic acquisition in 2018 by selling assets to Shearwater). Shallow seismic is much less high-tech and players are usually smaller, Fugro being one of the biggest ones, if not the biggest.