Deep-water (1000 m+) Sabah, Malaysia, is a frontier exploration province proximal to successful exploration trends within the Sabah thrusts zone and Luconia carbonate shelf. The basin is on trend with numerous proven petroleum systems; however, it remains underexplored with minimal drilling activities targeting the deep-water hydrocarbon plays. The need to build reliable regional interpretation over large prospective areas led to a broadband multimeasurement towed-streamer acquisition over 19,500 km2 in offshore Sabah. In this work, we illustrate an integrated workflow that incorporates contemporary broadband processing, interpretation-guided earth model building, and multiphysics input to interpretation to generate a high-resolution seismic image that will accelerate exploration in the region.
Ocean-bottom node (OBN) surveys are an increasingly common choice of method for marine seismic acquisition and offer several key advantages. These include recording wide-azimuth data and reliable low-frequency information. Since the start of OBN acquisition almost two decades ago, key challenges remain, not only on equipment handling and data management, but also on the data processing and imaging methodologies as these multicomponent workflows continue to evolve. We present a case study of an OBN survey acquired in offshore Sabah with a cross-spread geometry, in an ultra-shallow-water environment. This study discusses a few key processing challenges encountered due to this sparse acquisition including noise and multiple energy contamination and aliasing on data. We explain the challenges, how these were overcome, and the methodologies we used to enhance the data quality. As the main product for this project is a depth-imaged seismic volume, we also describe the earth model building workflow and imaging tools we used to leverage the advantage of full-azimuth data and multidirectional wavefield recorded in this survey. This includes full-waveform inversion, multi-azimuth tomography, and imaging with multiple.
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