Dr Matthew Lamont, managing director and founder, DUG Technology, discusses the company’s seismic processing solutions and what it will showcase at the MEOS/GEO exhibition
Can you give some brief background about your company and how your HPC solutions are used in the oil and gas sector?
Put simply, DUG is an innovative technology provider for the global resource sector. We founded DUG in 2003 to capitalise on an idea for a Bayesian decision support system. Our aim was to help companies process and image their large seismic datasets, presenting the results in ways that were easier to understand and leverage.
We have always had a strong focus on R&D – both in applied geoscience technology and high performance computing (HPC), two areas which go hand-in-hand in our business. We also recognised that we needed our own software to stay competitive and to continue innovating. We have grown a large, talented R&D team who work on all aspects of our technology offerings, which consist of HPC as-a-service, geoscience and data services, and software – offered to our clients directly or tailored to suit their needs via our DUG HPC Cloud platform.
Can you tell us about DUG Wave and how this technology works to simplify the seismic imaging process?
We started building DUG Wave in 2016 with the goal of reducing project turnaround time and improving results through a combination of the more advanced physics of full waveform inversion (FWI) and the horsepower of HPC. Since 2018 we have successfully delivered high-frequency FWI solutions, and in 2021 we introduced our revolutionary multi-parameter FWI imaging technology.
Conventional seismic workflows contain many time-consuming serial steps. We wanted to do this more efficiently. Our innovative approach provides reflectivity images for both structural and quantitative interpretation, without the need for those serial steps. It enables full-wavefield model building and least-squares imaging using field-data input, simultaneously handling deghosting, demultiple and designature. It is literally the entire conventional workflow in a single process! It also elegantly handles regularisation, attenuation and anisotropy. The angle-dependent outputs allow not only conventional interpretation but also AVA analysis as well. I really can’t overstate how excited we are about this technology as a complete and superior solution for subsurface characterisation.
Can you tell us about your deblending solution and why deblending is important in this region?
Deblending is a common requirement for processing modern surveys. It is an enabling technology in terms of what it allows you to do in the field with respect to both acquisition efficiency and sampling.
We have our own state-of-the-art inversion-based solution for deblending which gradually reconstructs the shots as if they had been acquired separately. We have processed countless datasets covering towed-streamer, OBN and land-data acquisition, with the number of interfering sources ranging from 3 up to around 40. We have also demonstrated how deblending is an elegant solution to seismic interference – which is nothing more than unintended blended acquisition.
Improvements in land seismic come from increases in data density, and blended acquisition makes this a more economical option. Our inversion-based deblending also has other benefits, such as improving the signal-to-noise ratio compared to conventional unblended data.
We have performed exceptionally well in deblending benchmarks, achieving the best result in all those where we are aware of the outcome.
Can you tell us about your plans for MEOS/GEO and what you will be showcasing?
I am very excited that DUG will be exhibiting at MEOS/GEO. While we process all types of seismic data, high-density land has been a focal point for us in recent times. Our Houston office is now the biggest land data processing centre in North America, and indeed, DUG is now the third largest proprietary seismic data processing company in the world. We design, own, and operate a network of some of the largest and greenest supercomputing installations on Earth which support this effort.
While our team at MEOS/GEO will be available to discuss all aspects of our technology offerings we will certainly be focusing on our onshore processing and imaging capabilities. I believe the combination of our deblending and multi-parameter FWI imaging can provide significant benefits, both technical and commercial.
DUG Insight is our flagship software product for seismic interpretation. It is modern, intuitive and interactive with a complete functionality offering for interpretation, visualisation, time processing, depth imaging and FWI. We look forward to showcasing both our software and HPC as-a-service offerings too.
