Intelligent OBN (iOBN) with autonomous seafloor seismic processing — Technology Concept

Current technologies for 4D seismic for reservoir monitoring involve gathering raw data in the field and later processing it on powerful computers with a lot of human intervention to QC the data and improve the results. There are several steps in these work processes that are standards for the industry. The development of new ocean bottom sensor technologies, like OBN, PRM and On-Demand OBN (Lopez, et al. 2023) bring many advantages for improved seismic images, but keep some previous work processes, where data is processed far away from the field at great expense. This paper proposes a new paradigm applicable to OBN-based technology, where processing is done in the field. To reduce cost this processing would be done autonomously, which is a firm requirement when the nodes are permanently on the seafloor. Rapid advances in AI show that this proposal is possible and may even be feasible in the extreme case of seafloor processing, with imaged data acoustically transmitted to surface to crewed or uncrewed vessels. The aim of such intelligent OBN (iOBN) technology is to reduce cost and to deliver data just-in-time to accelerate reservoir management decisions.