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gins of Brazil have been a core area for our investment campaigns over recent years.” The project has received high prefunding from a number of major industry players and covers an area of 11,330 sq. km. The Foz do Amazonas Basin survey is being acquired by the MV Oceanic Endeavour deploying Ser- cel’s next-generation Sentinel RD solid streamer and started in January 2014. The Sentinel RD has a reduced diameter and a 15% weight reduction, compared to the original Sentinel, providing re- duced cable drag and increased storage capacity aboard the seismic vessel. Pas- cal Rouiller, CEO of Sercel, and Senior Executive Vice President of CGGVeritas said, “Offering the best signal-to-noise ratio, Sentinel is the most operationally effi cient system available in the industry today.” While the CEO of CGGVeritas, Jean-Georges Malcor said, “Sentinel RD can be deployed for a wider range of layout options including denser or lon- ger confi gurations to meet growing de- mand for high-end marine seismic tech- niques such as broadband, high-density and long-offset acquisition.” The seismic streamer vessel, MV Oce- anic Endeavour, was launched in 2008 and is equipped to tow up to 16 stream- ers, and 8 gunstrings. She is one of the most powerful and high-capacity vessels of her class in the world, and has a crew of 70. The high-end BroadSeis data set will be processed in CGG’s state-of-the- art subsurface imaging center in down- town Rio de Janeiro using CGG’s pro- prietary geovation software for seismic data processing, imaging and reservoir characterization, including a new gen- eration of massive high-density wide-az- imuth datasets, true 3D wide-azimuth al- gorithms and anisotropic depth imaging along with the latest compute-intensive imaging algorithms. “There is an unsur- prising high level of industry interest in the Brazilian equatorial margin given the recent Zaedyus discovery to the northwest of Foz do Amazonas as well as analogous discoveries in the West Af- rican equatorial margin. Our joint pro- gram with Spectrum will capitalize on CGG’s high-end BroadSeis technology and Spectrum’s recent 2D program ex- perience in the Fóz do Amazonas Basin to bring unique insight to this high-po- tential area,” said Malcor. Exploration Challenges Petrobras geologist have stated that the EM’s geology is more complex that at other Brazilian basin essentially due to interpretation diffi culties caused by shear faults that resulted in a far more complex model for these sedimentary basins and that when separating from the African continent, the movements at the South Atlantic coast were more of distention and not of dragging of one over the other. This created a very complex situation and is still interfering in the defi nition of the dynamics of the region’s petroleum system. With speeds of up to 1 meter per second (1.94 knots), currents in the region are another major hurdle operator need to overcome during E&P. In some areas along the EM the Off shore: Brazil Seismic Streamer MV Oceanic Endeavour. Photo: Mic hel Floc h April 2014 36 MTR MTR #3 (34-49).indd 36 4/9/2014 10:52:21 AM
