csem crude and useless

From what we've seen, CSEM isn't all its cracked up to be. That is not to say we should abandon the whole notion of using EM surveying for de-risking, quite the contrary. However, I do believe the primitive method used in both Senegal and AGC is about as useful as tits on a bull.

CSEM in its current form became redundant back in 2002'ish when 3 guys - Wright, Ziolkowski and Hobbs - developed the concept of Multi-Transient Electro Magnetic surveying (same concept of using EM waves, very different implementation)

They formed MTEM ltd in 2004 (same year as Rocksource was floated) and raised US$20mil to further develop the technology. In 2007, just a few months after completing their first MTEM survey Petroleum Geo-Services bought them for US$275mil. Since then PGS has been flat out developing the technology further.

Main difference: "Geophysically speaking, the first-order difference between CSEM and MTEM is that CSEM is a frequency domain pursuit and MTEM is a time domain pursuit. In theory the two techniques will produce equivalent results, but CSEM in practice fails to record sufficient frequency range data to match the advantages of MTEM."

CSEM is expensive - nodes have to be individually deployed on the sea floor, has water depth limitations, less accurate. As far as I'm concerned, CSEM in its current form is so crude and uncertain that it cannot provide any derisking in frontier basins.

MTEM is 3 to 5 times cheaper because it is collected using a towed method, can be shot at the same time as 3D seismic, can test multiple depths so resistive layers above reservoir targets can be identified (I think I read somewhere they'd improved depth resolution to 50m), can be shot in water depths as shallow as 10m and they're extending analysis from 2D to 3D models. There's also an onshore system as well.

Commercial launch in 2012, certainly looking forward to it.



Definitely going to be a damn site more useful than a red smudge 500m in diameter, telling us there is something very very resistive, somewhere down there.