Others are awaiting discovery, driven by needed improvements to seismic data quality to image the prospects.
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The more McMoRan and its team work through the seismic data the more they learn.
Armed with promising seismic data, the pair then convinced Noble and Delek to buy into their lease.
Over the last two decades, supercomputing allowed new skill levels in interpreting seismic data of below-ground structures.
Advances in using seismic data have been dramatic over the last 25 years.
It has spent tens of millions of dollars evaluating seismic data and funding drilling crews, mostly Turks, Kurds and Romanians.
Cray ( CRAY - news - people ) supercomputer to process gulf seismic data in three dimensions.
Father-and-son-team Orazio and Salvatore Consoli help gather the seismic data -- three generations of their family have worked on the volcano.
It helps its customers in the acquisition and processing of seismic data as well as in reservoir characterization and monitoring activities.
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Repeatedly, this pioneering company is solving engineering and geological interpretation problems of seismic data that nobody else has dealt with before.
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Just two weeks ago, they had sold seismic data company Dawson Geophysical (nasdaq: DWSN - news - people ).
But evaluating the seismic data and log reports has not been easy.
Geokinetics acquires and processes seismic data on oil and gas prospects worldwide.
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Imaging through rock is one thing, but seismic data get scrambled when it bounces off layers of salt deep under the seabed.
Just two weeks ago, they had sold seismic data company Dawson Geophysical.
The oil industry uses supercomputers to trawl seismic data before drilling wells.
Adamo is especially enthusiastic about Dawson for its position as the largest provider of onshore seismic data acquisition services in the United States.
In Houston Chevron's geologists literally sit on top of 8 petabytes of seismic data--enough to fill 900, 000 DVDs--housed in two floors of computer servers.
Last year, the joint venture finished its seismic data acquisition in the Black Sea and plans to do the same for the Kara Sea this year.
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Secretary Chu wrapped up the briefing with an overview of the ongoing work by the federal science team to collect and analyze acoustic, sonar and seismic data.
The reinterpretation of seismic data has also pushed the boundaries.
As of March 2012, Australia, France, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Turkey and the USA had taken advantage of incorporating CTBTO seismic data into the use of their national tsunami monitoring.
The current plan for Blueberry is to come back up the hole and sidetrack again to get around the nonconformity or fault that seems to have not shown up on the seismic data.
Apparently there are few geologists in the world who have the skill to interpret the logs and read the seismic data from the cretaceous to establish exactly what has been found 6 miles down.
Each well drilled, whether a hit or a miss, a discovery or a dry hole, adds to the geologic knowledge the company has with which to interpret its now vast array of seismic data.
What would have taken three months to render on a Cray in 1993 now takes two hours or less on a PC, says Barney Issen, Chevron's senior geophysicist in charge of interpreting seismic data.
As an indicator, in 2011, about 2.3 gigabytes of IMS primary seismic, auxiliary seismic and hydroacoustic data were sent in near-real time daily to tsunami warning organizations.
Realising the importance of the available data, seismic reflection surveys are now undertaken.
To develop a deepwater oil field, geologists first sift through terabytes of data collected by undersea seismic devices.
Recently, we started applying our big data analytics technologies in other industries, such as seismic exploration of minerals and fundamental physics.
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