In this episode of Beneath the Subsurface we turn back time with Daniel Orange, our ONE Partner for multibeam technology and seafloor mapping - and incredible storyteller - and Duncan Bate, our Director of Project Development in the Gulf of Mexico and Geosciences. Dan takes Duncan and Erica on an expansive journey through time to meet a special variety of archea that dwell in the impossible oases surrounding sea bottom vents. We also explore the relatively recent discoveries in geoscience leading to seafloor mapping and how seep hunting offshore can enrich the exploration process today.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
00:00 - Intro
03:35 - What is a seep?
09:06 - The impossible oasis
11:45 - Chemotrophic life
24:15 - Finding seeps
26:51 - The invention of multibeam technology
30:11 - Seep hunting with multibeam
32:48 - Seismic vs. multibeam
34:43 - Acquiring multibeam surveys
44:32 - The importance of navigation
46:20 - Water column anomalies
49:12 - Seeps sampling and exploration
56:23 - Multibeam targets
59:12 - Multibeam strategy
1:03:11 - Reservoir content
1:06:44 - A piece of the puzzle
1:10:21 - Conclusion
EXPLORE MORE FROM THE EPISODE
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Erica Conedera:
00:00:12
Hello and welcome to Beneath the Subsurface a podcast that explores the intersection of Geoscience and technology. From the Software Development Department here at TGS. I'm your host, Erica Conedera. For our fourth episode, we'll welcome a very special guest speaker who offers a uniquely broad perspective on the topic of sea floor mapping. We'll learn about the technology of multibeam surveys, why underwater oil seeps are the basis of life as we know it and how the answer to the age old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg is the Sun. I'm here today with Duncan Bate, our director of projects for the US and Gulf of Mexico. Do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself Duncan?
Duncan Bate:
00:00:56
Sure, yeah, thanks. I basically look after the development of all new projects for TGS in the, in the Gulf of Mexico. I'm here today because a few years ago we worked on a multi beam seep hunting project in the Gulf of Mexico. So I can share some of my experiences and - having worked on that project.
Erica:
00:01:15
Awesome. And then we have our special guest star, Dan Orange. He is a geologist and geophysicist with Oro Negro exploration. Hi Dan.
Dan Orange:
00:01:24
Good morning.
Erica:
00:01:25
Would you like to introduce yourself briefly for us?
Dan:
00:01:28
Sure. Let's see, I grew up in New England, Texas, so I went to junior high school, just a few miles from where we're recording this. But I did go to MIT where I got my bachelor's and master's degree in geology, then went out to UC Santa Cruz to do my PhD and my PhD had field work both onshore and offshore and involved seeps. So we'll come back to that. And also theoretical work as well. I had a short gig at Stanford and taught at Cal State Monterey Bay and spent five years at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Again, pursuing seeps. I left MBARI and started working with the oil patch in 1997 and it was early days in the oil industry pushing off the shelf and heading toward deep water and seeps were both a bug and a feature. So we started applying seep science to the oil industry and have been doing that for oh, now 21-22 years.
Dan:
00:02:32
The entire time that I was at Embargin, and working with the oil patch. And in fact, ongoing, I do research for the US Navy through the Office of Naval Research. It started out involving seeps and canyon formation and it's evolved into multibeam seafloor mapping and acoustics. And that continues. So in the oil patch I was with AOA geophysics, we formed a company AGO to commercialize controlled source EM sold that to Schlumberger. And then we formed an oil company, Black Gold Energy, that would use seeps as a way to, go into oil exploration. And we sold that to NYKO, since leaving Black Gold with Oro Negro. We've been teaming with TGS since 2014 so now going on five years mapping the sea floor, I think we just passed one and a quarter million square kilometers, mapping with TGS as we mapped the sea floor and sample seeps, pretty much around the world for exploration.
Erica:
00:03:35
Awesome. So let's begin our discussion today with what is a seep, if you can elucidate that for us.
Dan:
00:03:41
So a seep is just what it sounds like. It's, it's a place on the earth's surface where something leaks out from beneath. And in our case it's oil and gas. Now seeps have been around since the dawn of humanity. The seeps are referenced in the Bible and in multiple locations seeps were used by the ancient Phoenicians to do repairs on ships they use as medicines and such. And in oil exploration seeps have been used to figure out where to look for oil since the beginning of the oil age. In fact that, you know, there seeps in, in Pennsylvania near Titusville where colonel Drake drilled his first well, where Exxon, had a group of, of people that they call the rover boys that went around the world after World War II looking for places on the Earth's surface that had big structures and oil seeps.
Dan:
00:04:39
Because when you have a seep at the sea floor with or on the Earth's surface with oil and gas, you know that you had organic matter that's been cooked the right amount and it's formed hydrocarbons and it's migrating and all those things are important to findings, you know, economic quantities of oil and gas. So seeps have been used on land since the beginning of oil and gas exploration. But it wasn't until the 1990s that seeps began to affect how we explore offshore. So that's seeps go back to since the dawn of humanity, they were used in oil exploration from the earliest days, the 1870's and 80's onward. But they've been used offshore now since the mid 1990s. So that's, that's kind of, that seeps in context.
Duncan:
00:05:31
But it's actually the, I, the way I like to think about it, it's the bit missing from the, "What is Geology 101" that every, everyone in the oil and gas industry has to know. They always show a source rock and a migration to a trap and a seal. But that actually misses part of the story. Almost every basin in the world has leakage from that trap, either, either directly from the source rock or from the trap. It either fills to the spill point or it just misses the trap. Those hydrocarbons typically make their way to the surface at some point-
Dan:
00:06:04
at some point and somewhere. The trick is finding them.
Duncan:
00:06:08
Yeah, that's the seep. And thus what we're interested in finding.
Erica:
00:06:12
As Jed Clampett from the Beverly hillbillies discovered.
Erica:
00:06:15
Exactly.
Dan:
00:06:15
I was going to include that!
Erica:
00:06:19
Yes.
Dan:
00:06:19
Jed was out hunting for some food and up from the ground came a bubbling crude. That's it.
Erica:
00:06:27
Oil that is.
Dan:
00:06:29
Black gold.
Erica:
00:06:29
Texas tea.
Dan:
00:06:30
That's right. So that's that seep science. So today what we're going to do is we're going to talk about seep communities offshore because what I hope to be able to, you know, kind of convince you of is if oil and gas leak out of the sea floor, a seep community can form. Okay. Then we're going to talk about this thing called multibeam, which is a technique for mapping the sea floor because where you get a seep community, it affects the acoustic properties of the sea floor. And if we change the acoustic properties of sea floor or the shape of the sea floor with this mapping tool, we can identify a potential seep community and then we can go sample that.
Dan:
00:07:14
And if we can sample it, we can analyze the geochemistry and the geochemistry will tell us whether or not we had oil or gas or both. And we can use it in all sorts of other ways. But that's where we're going to go to today. So that's kind of, that's kind of a map of our discussion today. Okay. So as Duncan said, most of the world, he Duncan talked about how in- if we have, an oil basin or gas basin with charge, there's going to be some leakage somewhere. And so the trick is to find that, okay. And so, we could, we could look at any basin in the world and we can look at where wells have been drilled and we can, we can look at where seeps leak out of the surface naturally. And there's a correlation, like for example, LA is a prolific hydrocarbon basin. Okay. And it has Labrea tar pits, one of the most charismatic seeps on earth cause you got saber tooth tigers bubbling out
Duncan:
00:08:18
It's literally a tourist attraction.
Dan:
00:08:20
Right there on Wilshire Boulevard. Okay. And it's a hundred meters long by 50 meters wide. So a hundred yards long, 50 yards wide. And it, that is an oil seep on, on the earth surface in LA okay.
Duncan:
00:08:32
Now, it's important to mention that they're not all as big as that.
Dan:
00:08:34
No, no. Sometimes they're smaller. It could just literally be a patch of oil staining in the sand.
Erica:
00:08:41
Really, that's little.
Duncan:
00:08:41
Oh yeah. I mean, or just an area where there's a cliff face with something draining out of it or it, you know, it could be really, really small, which is easy to find onshore. You know, you send the rover boys out there like you mentioned, and you know, geologists working on the ground, they're going to find these things eventually. But the challenge, which we've been working on with, with the guys from One for the last few years, and now is finding these things offshore.
Dan:
00:09:06
So let's, let's turn the clock back to 1977. Alvin, a submarine, a submersible with three people in it went down on a Mid-ocean Ridge near the Galapagos Islands. And what they found, they were geologists going down to map where the oceanic crust is created. But what they found was this crazy community, this incredible, oasis of life with tube worms and these giant columns with what looked like black smoke spewing into the, into the ocean. And so what they found are what we now call black smokers or hot vents, and what was so shocking is the bottom of the ocean is it's a desert. There's no light, there's very little oxygen, there's not a lot of primary food energy. So what was this incredible, oasis of life doing thousands of meters down on, near the Galapagos Island? Well, it turns out that the base of the food chain for those hot vents are sulfide rich fluids, which come spewing out of the earth and they fuel a chemically based, community that thrives there and is an oasis as there because there's so much energy concentrated in those hot sulfide rich fluids that it can support these chemically based life forms.
Dan:
00:10:34
So that's 1977 in 1985 in the same summer, chemically based life forms, but based on ambient temperature, water, not hot water were found in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Oregon that same summer, 1985 in the Gulf of Mexico, the base of the food chain, what was fueling this chemical energy was hydrocarbons, oil and gas, and off the coast of Oregon, what was fueling it was hydrogen sulfide. So this is 1985, the year I graduated college. And so I started graduate school in 1986 and part of my research was working with the group that was trying to figure out the plumbing that was bringing these chemically rich fluids up to the earth's surface that were feeding this brand new community of life. You know, what we now call cold seeps. So, we, you know, depending on what you had for breakfast today, you know, eggs or pancakes or had your coffee, all the energy that we've got coursing through our veins right now is based upon photosynthesis.
Dan:
00:11:45
We're either eating plants that got their energy from sunlight or we're eating eggs that came from chickens that eat the plants that can, where the came from, sunlight. Everything in our world up here is based upon photosynthesis. So, but the seep communities, the hot vents and the black smokers and the cold seeps, the base of the food pyramid is chemical energy. So they're called chemosynthetic communities or chemoautotrophic because the bacteria get their trophic energy, the energy that they need to live from chemicals. And so the bacteria utilize the chemicals and organisms have evolved to host these bacteria inside their bodies. And the bacteria metabolize the chemical energy to produce the enzymes that these larger organisms need to live. So these larger organisms can include clams, tube worms, the actual bacteria themselves. But, so the kind of how does this work is- let's get, because if we understand how seeps work and we know that seeps can be based upon oil and gas seepage, then you'll understand why we're using these seeps to go out and impact, oil and gas exploration.
Dan:
00:13:09
So the- at the bottom of the ocean, we have a little bit of oxygen, but as we go down into the sediments, below the surface, we, we consume all that oxygen and we get to what's called the redox boundary to where we go from sulfate above it to hydrogen sulfide below it. And so below this redox boundary, we can have methane, we can have oil, but above that redox boundary, the methane will oxidize and the oil will be biodegraded and eaten by critters and whatnot. Now, living at that boundary, are bacteria who metabolize these compounds, and that's where they get the energy they need to live. These bac- Okay, now kind of turned the clock even farther back before the earth had an oxygen atmosphere, the only way that organisms got energy to live was from chemicals. Okay? So before we had algae and we created this oxygen atmosphere that we breathe billions of years ago, the organisms that lived on earth were chemosynthetic.
Dan:
00:14:13
So these bacteria survive today and they live everywhere where we cross this redox boundary. Okay? So there they're actually archaea, which are some of the most primitive forms of bacteria, and I'm not a biologist, so I can't tell you how many billions of years ago they formed, but they're ancient and they're living down there.
Erica:
00:14:33
So they haven't changed since then. They're basically the same?
Dan:
00:14:36
Nope.
Erica:
00:14:36
Wow.
Dan:
00:14:36
They figured out a way to get energy to survive. It works.
Erica:
00:14:40
Why change it?
Dan:
00:14:41
If you're an Archea, right? So they're living down there at that redox boundary. Now, if we have seepage-seepage, is the flow of liquids. You actually lift that redox boundary. And if you have enough seepage, you can lift that boundary right to the sediment water interface. If you step in a pond and you smell that, sulfide, that rotten egg smell, your foot has gone through the redox boundary.
Dan:
00:15:08
Okay? And you've disturbed some archaea down there and they'll get nudged aside. They'll go find someplace else. Okay? So with seepage, we lift the redox boundary to the sediment water interface and, and the bacteria are there and they're ready to utilize the reduced fluids as their source of energy. And so you can see them, we have pictures. You can do an internet search and say, you know, bacteria chemosynthetic bacteria and images and look at and look at photos of them. They it, they look like, okay, when you put the Guacamole in the back of the fridge and you forget it for three weeks and you open it up, that's what they look like. It's that fuzzy. It's this fuzzy mat of bacteria. And those are the bacteria. They're out there. They're metabolizing these fluids. Okay. Now in the process of metabolizing these fluids, they produce the bacteria, produce enzymes like ATP.
Dan:
00:16:01
And I wish my partner John Decker, was here because he would correct me. I think it's adinase triphosphate and it's an enzyme that your body produces and sends out to basically transmit chemical energy. Okay. Now at some point in geologic time, and I'll, I'll actually put a number on this in a second. The larger fauna like clams and tube worms, evolve to take advantage of the fact that the bacteria are producing energy. And so they then evolve to use the bacteria within themselves to create the energy that they need to live. Okay? So, what happens is these seep fauna produce larva, the larva go into, you know, kind of a dormant stage and they're flowing around the ocean. And if they sense a seep, okay. They settle down and they start to grow and as, and then they, they, they, the bacteria become part of them.
Dan:
00:16:56
They're the, the clams. You open a clam in the bacteria live in the gills. Okay. And so they'd grow and, and so these clams and tube worms start to grow and they form a community. Okay. So that a clam, what a clam does these clams, they stick their foot into the, into the sediment and they absorb the reduced fluids into their circulation system. They bring that, that circulating fluid to their gills where the bacteria then metabolize these reduced fluids and send the enzymes out to the tissues of the clam so it can grow. So this clam does not filter feed like every other clam on the planet. The tube worms that host these bacteria in them don't filter feed. So the base of the food chain is chemosynthetic. But the megafauna themselves, don't get their energy directly from methane or hydrogen sulfide. They get their energy from the bacteria, which in the bacteria, you know, the bacteria happy, they'll live anywhere.
Dan:
00:17:59
But sitting here in a clam, they get the reduced fluids they need to live and they grow. Now it's what's cool for us as, as seep hunters is different species have evolved to kind of reflect different types of fluids. So if you know a little bit about seep biology, when you pick up like a batheum Modiolus mussel, you go, Huh? There could be oil here. Okay. Because that particular mussel is found in association with, with oil seeps. Okay. So that we won't go too far down that path, but there are different organisms. The important thing is that these communities, form again an oasis of life, a high concentration of life where we have a seep. Now, the oldest seep community that I'm aware of is Devonian. So that's between 420 and 360 million years. It's found in the high atlas mountains of Morocco.
Dan:
00:18:58
And that seep community, a fossil seep community includes the same types of clams in tube worms that we find today. Okay. But they're also found with authigenic carbonate. Okay. Which is like limestone. And so, and that limestone in cases, this fossil seep community and has preserved it for hundreds of millions of years. So where does limestone come from? So remember we've got methane, CH4 in our, in some of our seep fluids. Well, if that's oxidized by bacteria, cause they're going to get energy from the methane they produced bicarbonate, which is HCO3 as a negative charge on it. And that bicarbonate, if it sees calcium, they like each other. And so they'll form calcium carbonate, limestone. And since sea water is everywhere saturated with calcium, if we have a natural gas seep, the bacteria will oxidize in natural gas and the bicarbonate will grab the calcium to form this cement.
Dan:
00:20:04
Now deep enough in the ocean, it actually is acidic enough that that cement will start to dissolve. So we just have this, we have a factory of of bacteria. It might be dissolving some places, but most of the places we look, the carbonate doesn't dissolve. So we've got clams, tube worms, we've got the limestone authigenic carbonate, and if the pressure and temperature are in the right field, that methane can also form this really cool substance called gas hydrate and gas hydrate is a clathrate the, it's a combination of water and methane where the water forms an ice-like cage and the methane sits in that cage. And so you can light this on fire in your hand and the gas will burn. Nice yellow flame will go up from your hand and the cage will melt. The ice melts. So you get cold water on your hand with flames going up. It, it's cool stuff.
Erica:
00:21:03
Did you bring one of these to show us today?
Dan:
00:21:06
The pressure and temperature in this room are not, methane's not an equilibrium. You need hot, you need high pressure, moderately high pressure and you need very low temperatures. So, if we had-
Duncan:
00:21:20
Neither are common in Houston, (Laughter)
Dan:
00:21:22
No, and we wouldn't be terribly comfortable if that was what it was like here in this room. But the, the important thing for us now as we think about seep science and, and seep hunting is that this, this limestone cement, the authigenic carbonate, the gas hydrate, the shells of a clam, okay. Are All harder. Okay? Harder, I will knock on the table. They're harder than mud. So the sea floor, most of the most of the world's ocean is gray-green mud and ooze from all sorts of sediment and diatoms and plankton raining down onto the ocean floor. So most of the world's oceans is kind of just muddy sandy some places, but sediment, it's where you get these seep communities that now we've, we've formed a spot that some that's harder and rougher than the area around it. And that's our target when we, deploy technologies to go out and, and look at seeps.
Dan:
00:22:26
So, so hot smokers, hot vents were discovered in 1977. Cold seeps were discovered in 1985 and were found to be associated, in the Gulf of Mexico with oil and gas seepage. That's 1985. Those were discovered with human beings in a sub in submersibles. Later, we deployed robotic submersibles to go look at seeps, ROV's and even later we developed tools to go sample seeps without needing to have eyes on the bottom and we'll come and talk and we'll come back and talk about that later.
Dan:
00:22:57
But for kind of recap, a seep is a place where something is leaking out of the earth surface. When we talk about seeps, we're talking about offshore seepage of oil and gas that supports this profusion of chemically-based life forms as well as these precipitants, the authigenic carbonate limestone and gas hydrate. And the important thing is they change the acoustic properties of the sea floor.
Duncan:
00:23:28
Yeah. Then the key thing is that you've gone from having, seeps onshore, which are relatively easy to walk up to and see, but hard to find, to seeps offshore, which are impossible to walk up to or very difficult. You need a submersible to do it. But because of this, chemosynthetic communities that build up around it and our knowledge of that and now gives us something to look for geophysically. So we can apply some geophysics, which we'll get on to talk about next in terms of the multibeam, to actually hunt for these things in a very cost effective way and a very fast manner. So we can cover, as Dan said, right at the start, hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, even over a million now, in a cost effective, timely manner and identify these seeps from the sea surface.
Dan:
00:24:15
Now fishermen, know where seeps are because all of this limestone provides places for fish to leave their larva where they might live, they call them refugia. It's a, it's a place where, you know, lots of little fish and where you have lots of little fish, you have lots of big fish. And since we're also increasing this primary productivity, you get, you get profusions of fish around seep communities. So we've found authigenic carbonate in the front yards of fishermen in areas where that we've gone to study seeps. And if you chip a little bit off it, you can go and analyze it in the lab or if you can get somebody who fishes for a living to tell you their spots. And that involves convincing them that you're not going to steal their spots and you're not gonna tell everybody where their spots are. But if you go into a frontier area, if you can get somebody who fishes for a living to talk to you, you might have some ideas of where to go look for them.
Dan:
00:25:14
So it kind of, one other point that I wanted to make here about seeps is, remember I talked about how seep organism creates kind of a larva, which is dormant and it's kind of flowing through the world's ocean, looking for a seep community, doing some back of the envelope calculations. If, if a larva can survive for about a month. Okay. And you have a one knot current that larva can move about 1300 kilometers in a month, which is about the length of the island of Java. And it might be about the length of the state of California. So if you think now, so if you think about that, then all you need is a seep community somewhere to be sending out larva. Most of which of course never gonna survive. And then if we get a seep somewhere else, the odds are that there's going to be a larva bouncing along the sea floor that is going to see that and start growing.
Dan:
00:26:08
So for us as explorationists as the, the important thing is if there's a seep, there's a pretty good chance that, that a seep community will start to form, if the seepage lasts long enough, it will form a community depending, you know, might be large, might be medium size, but it changes the acoustic properties of the sea floor. Okay, so that, remember we're going to talk about seeps what they, what, what's a seep and that is how it's related to hydrocarbon seepage out of the or natural gas oil, you know, reduced fluids. What we were going to talk about, and now we're going to talk about how offshore we use this technology called multibeam to go and find them. Okay.
Dan:
00:26:51
So back in, back in the Cold War, the air force came up with a tool to map the former Soviet Union called synthetic aperture radar. And when the navy saw the air forces maps, they said, we want a map of the sea floor. And at the time, you know, if you remember your World War II movies, the submarine sends out a Ping, somebody listening on, their, on their headphones and and the ping comes back and the amount of time that it took for the ping to go out and the ping come back is how deep the water is. If you know the speed of sound in water. But that's, that's just one point directly beneath you, that's not good enough to get a detailed map of the sea floor. So, driven by these cold war needs, the navy contracted a company called general instruments to develop a tool to map the sea floor and they develop what's called SASS, the sonar array sounding system, which we now call multibeam.
Dan:
00:27:49
In the 1960s, it was unveiled to the world during a set of, submersible dives to the mid Ocean Ridge, I believe in 1975 as part of the famous project. And the geoscientist looked at that map and it was a contour map of the mid ocean region. They said, holy smokes, what's that? Where'd that come from? And the navy said, well, we kind of developed a new technology and it was first commercialized in 1977 the same year hot smokers were discovered on the world's oceans. And it has been continuously developed since then. And in about the 1990s, it got resolute enough for, for us to take this, this kind of seeps, seep hunting science and take it offshore. So until then, 1980s, we were deploying submersibles. We were going down and looking at them. We had very crude maps. We had some side scan shows, a little bit about, the acoustic properties of the sea floor.
Dan:
00:28:46
But it wasn't until the mid 1990s that we realized that with these tools, these sea floor mapping tools that had acoustic, analyzing techniques that we could identify areas that were harder and rougher and had a different shape, that allowed us to start, instead of just driving around and, and, we're finding one by, by luck or chance actually saying, Huh, there's a, there's an interesting acoustic signature over there. Let's go take a look at it. And deploying submersibles and ROVs and realizing that yes, we had tools that could, be used to, to map the sea floor and identify seeps and driven by their own interests. The Navy, the US navy was very interested in these and, was, was a early, early funder of seep science and they've continued with it as well as academic institutions around the world that got very interested in seep communities.
Dan:
00:29:45
And in fact, NASA, NASA is really interested in seep communities because they're chemically based life forms in what are basically extreme environments. And so if NASA wants to figure out what life is going to look like on a different planet, or a different moon on it, or surrounding a different planet that doesn't have an oxygen atmosphere, here's a, a laboratory on earth that, that they can use. So NASA has been funding seep science as well.
Dan:
00:30:11
So multibeam what is it and how does it apply to, to, to hunting seeps. So multibeam, which is this technology that was developed by and funded by the navy in the 1960s and commercialized in the 70s uses two acoustic arrays of transducers. one array is mounted parallel to the length of a ship. And when you fire off all those transducers, it sends out a ping. And the longer the array is, the narrower that beam is. That's how antennas work. So that that long array sends out a ping, which is narrow along track and a shape, kind of like a saucer. So if you can imagine two dinner plates put together, that's what this, ping of energy looks like. And that's what we call the transmit beam. So then if you listen to the sea floor with an array that's perpendicular to the transmitter ray, we are now listening to an area that's, that's narrow across track. Okay. And it's long elongate a long track. So we've got this narrow transmit beam in one direction that's, that's now perpendicular to the ship. And we've got a narrow receive beam that's parallel to the ship and where those two intersect is what we call a beam. And so with, with lots of different, transducers mounted, perpendicular to the ship, we can listen from all the way out to the port about 65 degrees down below the ship and all the way over to starboard, again, about 65 degrees. And we have lots of beams.
Dan:
00:31:51
So right now the system that we're using, on our project has 455 beams across track. So every time we send out a ping, we ensonify the sea floor on, on these 455 beams. And as we go along, we send out another ping and another ping. And we're basically, we're painting the sea floor. It's, it's like mowing the lawn with a big lawn mower or using a Zamboni to drive around an ice rink. You can just think of it as as a ship goes along. We are ensonifying and listening to a wide patch of sea floor and we typically map, about a five kilometer, about a three mile, a wide swath, and we send out a ping every six or 10 seconds. Depends how, you know, depends on the water depth. And so we're able to map 1000 or 2000 square kilometers a day with this technique. This multibeam technique.
Duncan:
00:32:48
Since a lot of our podcast listeners might be familiar with seismic is that's probably the biggest percentage of the, the geophysical industry. This is not too different. It's an acoustic based technique. I guess the main difference is are we live working in a different, frequency bandwidth. And also that we have both the receiver and the transmitter both mounted on the same boat. So we're not dealing with a streamer out the back of a boat. we have transmitter and receiver are both whole mounted. But after that it's all pretty similar to seismic. We go backwards and forwards, either in 2D lines or in a, in a 3D grid and we build up a picture. Now because of the frequencies we're working with, we don't penetrate very deep into the sea floor. but as, as we mentioned, we're interested in seeing those seep communities on the sea floor. So that's why we this, this is the perfect technology for, for that application.
Erica:
00:33:40
Oh, can you talk a little bit about the post-processing that's involved with multibeam?
Dan:
00:33:44
Well, let me- Erica, Great question. Let me, come back to that later cause I want to pay, I want to pick up on what Duncan talked about in and add one very important wrinkle. So first of all, absolutely correct, the frequencies are different. In seismic, we're down in the hertz to tens of Hertz and in Multibeam we're in the tens of kilohertz and in very shallow water, maybe even over higher than a hundred kilohertz. In seismic, we have air guns that send that radiate out energy. And we, we designed the arrays so that we get most of the energy in the direction that we're looking with multi beam. We have a narrow, remember it's one degree wide in here. If you got kids, see if anybody still has a protractor anymore, grab a protractor and look at how wide one degree is. It's very narrow.
Duncan:
00:34:39
There's probably an iPhone app for that. (Laughter) see what one used to look like.
Dan:
00:34:43
But with, with seismic, the air guns sends out energy and we listened to the reflected energy out on the streamer back behind the ship or on a node somewhere else. It's reflected energy. With multibeam, the energy goes out and it interacts with the sea floor and the shallow subsurface. Most of it gets reflected away and we don't, we don't, hear that it, but some of it actually comes back in the same direction that the sound went out and we call that backscatter. So backscatter energy comes back to you and it's that backscatter that, can increase when we have hard and rough material either on the sea floor or buried below the sea floor. So the way that we process it is since we know the time of length, the time of path on how long it took to get out, hit the sea floor and come back, or you can correct for path lengths, energy radiates outward and spherical patterns. So we correct for spherical spreading. we know the angle that it hit the sea floor, so we correct for angle of ensonification. And then the next and most important things are where was the ship, when the pulse went out? And where is the ship when the pulse comes back, including what's the orientation of the ship? So we need to know the location, the position of the ship in X, Y, and Z to centimeters. And we need to know the orientation of the ship to tenths of a degree or better on both the transmit and the receive. But the key thing is, if we know that path length in the spherical spreading and we correct for all of that and we get a response that's much greater than we expected, we get higher backscatter energy and it's, it's those clams and tube worms authigenic carbonate gas hydrate that can increase the hardness and the roughness of the sea floor that kicked back the backscatter energy.
Dan:
00:36:46
Okay. Now what happens if the oil and gas, or the reduced fluids if they shut off? Well, I'm sorry to say for the clams and the tube worms that they will eventually die. The bacteria will still live at that redox boundary as it settles back below the sediment. And then when we pile some sediment on top of that dead seep community, it's still there. The shells are there, the carbonate's still there. So with the, with multibeam that the frequencies, we use 12 and 30 kilohertz penetrate between two, three 10 meters or so into the sediment. So if you shut off the seepage and bury that seep community, they're still there. And if we can sample that below that redox boundary at that location, chances are we're going to get a oil or gas in, in our sample. And in fact, we encounter live seep communities very, very, very, very rarely, you know, kind of one in a thousand.
Dan:
00:37:50
But, we, we encounter seep fauna down in our sample cores, which we'll talk about later, much more frequently. And, and we, we find hydrocarbons, we are very successful at finding hydrocarbons. And the key thing is we're using seep science to go look in, in basins or extend outward from basins in areas where there may be no known oil or gas production. And that's why the seeps are useful. So multibeam unlike a seismic, we got to collect the data, then we got it and you to do all sorts of processing and it takes a while to, to crank the computers and whatnot. Multibeam we can, we can look at it as it comes in and we can see the backscatter strength. We can see what the swath that it's mapping every ping, every six seconds. And it takes about, it takes less than a day to process a days worth of multibeam.
Dan:
00:38:47
So when our ships are out there working every morning, when we get the daily report from the ship, we see another thousand or 2000 square kilometers of data that were mapped just the previous day. So it's for, those who can't wait, it's really satisfying. But for those of us who are trying to accelerate projects, it's great because when the data come off the ship, they're already processed. We can start picking targets and we can be out there, you know, in weeks sampling. So that's so multibeam it's, it's bathymetry, it's backscatter, but we're also imaging the water column. So if there's, a gas plume, coming out of the sea floor, naturally we can see that gas plume and, so that we can see the water column. We can see the sea floor or the bathymetry, and the backscatter. Erica, you asked, you know, about the processing and I talked about how we have to know the position and the orientation, of the ship, that means that we have to survey in using a laser theodolight.
Dan:
00:39:54
We have to survey in every component of the system on the ship to, you know, fractions of a millimeter. And we drive the surveyors nuts because we are, we are more demanding than the, the BMW plant in South Carolina. And they point that out to us every time. Yes, we're more demanding. But if they have a problem with, with a robot in the BMW plant, they can go out and survey it again, once we put this ship in the water, I can't go survey the array that's now welded to the bottom of the ship. It's there. And so that's why we make them do three replicate surveys and do loop ties and convince us that we've got incredibly accurate and precise system. So that's when we survey the ship. We use, well we go back and we go and we check their math and we make sure all the numbers are entered into the system correctly.
Dan:
00:40:46
We, measure the water column every day so that we have the best velocity data that we use to correct the, that position. We measure the salinity in the water column because it affects how energy is absorbed. It's called the absorption coefficient. We measure the acoustic properties of the ship. So we understand maybe we need to turn off the starboard side pump in order to get better multibeam data. And we evaluate every component of the ship. Something. Sometimes they'll have, you know, the, the waste unit was, was mounted onto the, onto the deck of the ship and nobody thought about putting a rubber bushing between that unit and the hall to isolate the sound. And it just so happens it's at 12 kilohertz. So it swamps your acoustic energy or degrades our data quality because it's all about data quality so that we can find these small, interesting high backscatter targets. We polish the hull. We send divers down every eight weeks or 12 weeks or 16 weeks because you get biofouling you get, you get these barnacles growing in a barnacle in between your acoustic array in the sea floor is going to affect the data. So we send divers down to go scrape the hull and scraped the prop.
Duncan:
00:42:05
So it's probably worth mentioning that this is the same type of multibeam or multibeam data is the same data that is used in other parts of the oil and gas industry as well. So I mean, any pipeline that's ever been laid in the last few decades has had a multibeam survey before it. Any bit of marine infrastructure that an oil and gas company wants to put in the Gulf of Mexico. Certainly you have to have a multibeam survey ahead of time. what's different here is that we're, we're trying to cover big areas and we're trying to get a very specific resolution. So maybe it's worth talking a bit about that. Dan what we're actually trying to achieve in terms of the resolution to actually find seeps.
Dan:
00:42:42
You got it. So we, we can, we can control the resolution because we can control how wide a swath we go and how fast we go. So, if you're really interested in, if you want to do a site survey and you want to get incredibly detailed data of a three kilometer by three kilometer square, you could deploy an autonomous underwater vehicle or an ROV and get very, very, very resolute, like smaller than half a meter of bin size. for what we do, where our goal is exploration, the trade off is between, do I want more resolute data or do I want more data and it that that is a tradeoff and it's something that we struggle with. And we think that the sweet spot is mapping that five kilometers swath and three miles wide, swath at about oh eight to 10 knots. So let's say about 16 kilometers an hour.
Dan:
00:43:40
That gets us a thousand to 2000 square kilometers a day. And by acquiring data in that manner, we get a 15 meter bathymetric bin independent of water depth and our backscatter since we subsample that bathymetric bin for the backscatter, we can get a five meter backscatter pixel. So now if I have four, if I have four adjacent pixels, you know, shaped like a square, that's a 10 meter by 10 meter spot on the sea floor, it's slightly larger than this room. We could, you could see that now you might need a couple of more to be larger than that. So to have a target actually stand out, and that's about how accurate our sampling is with the core barrel. So, the long answer to your question is about a 15 meter bathymetric bin and a five meter backscatter pixel is what we're currently doing for our exploration work.
Dan:
00:44:32
Now we pay attention to what's going on in the navigation and the positioning world because it affects our data quality. So the higher the quality of, of our navigation, the higher the quality of our data on the sea floor. So about a decade ago, the world's airlines asked if they could fly their airplanes closer together and the FAA responded and said, not unless you improve GPS and so sponsored by the world's airlines. They set up ground stations all in, in the, in the most heavily traveled parts of the world that improve the GPS signal by having an independent orbital corrections. What that means is for us working off shore, we take advantage of it. It's called wide area augmentation. And, using this system, which is now it's a, it's add on for a GPS receiver, we're able to get six centimeter accuracy of a ship that's out there in the ocean that surveying.
Dan:
00:45:27
So that's six centimeters. What's that? About two and a half inches. And for those of us who grew up with low ran and very, you know, where you were lucky if you knew where you were to within, you know, a quarter of a mile. it's, it's just astonishing to me that this box can produce data of that quality, but that flows through to the quality of the data that we get on our surveys, which flows through to our ability to find targets. So I think, I told you about sub sampling, the bathymetry for backscatter and I've told, I told you about the water column and we've talked about the resolution. I think we've, we've pretty much hit what multibeam is. It's, it's a real time near real time acquisition, high frequency narrow beam. We image the sea floor and the shallow subsurface. Okay and we use that to find anomalous backscatter targets.
Duncan:
00:46:20
Well, let's talk about the water column a little bit more done because I know we've published some pictures and images from our surveys. Showing the water column anomalies. The backscatter data, in the water column itself can actually help us find seeps. The right mixture of oil and gas coming out of this, an active seep and migrating up through the water column can actually be picked up on these multibeam data also. So that's, a real direct hit that you've got to see and that it's actually still producing oil today,
Dan:
00:46:53
Right, so when, when gas and oil leak out of the sea floor, the gas bubble begins to expand as it comes up, just like a would in a, in a carbonated beverage because there's less pressure. So that gap, that bubble is expanding. If there's oil present, the oil coats the outside of the bubble and actually protects it from dissolving into the water column. And so the presence of gas with a little bit of oil leaking out of the sea floor creates these bubbles that, are big enough to see with these 12 and 30 kilohertz systems. And so when we see a plume coming out of the sea floor, that's natural, a seepage of gas, possibly with a little bit of oil and it provides a great target for us to go and hit. Now those seeps are flowing into the water column and the water column has currents and the currents aren't the same from one day to the next and one week to the next.
Dan:
00:47:47
So if we image a seep a couple of different times, one day it will be flowing in one direction and the next time we see it flowing in a different direction. The area in common between the two is pointing us toward the origin point on the sea floor. And that's what we're going to target. And if you, if you hunt around, look for NOAA studies of, of the US Gulf of Mexico, over Mississippi Canyon near where the deep water horizon, went down because there are, the, NOAA has published, images of the gas seeps in that area where there are natural oil and gas seeps leaking, leaking other, the sea floor. And these natural seeps occur all over the world. Okay? And they're bringing oil and gas into the water column. But remember, nature has basically provided, the cleanup tool, which is the bacteria. So where oil and gas settle onto the sea floor, there are bacteria that will consume it. You don't want a lot of it in one place, cause then then you've got, you know, a real environmental disaster. But natural oil and gas seepage goes hand in hand with natural seep consuming organisms that metabolize these fluids. So a multi beam seeps backscatter okay. That I think we've, we've talked about what the target looks like. Let's talk about how we go in and sample it.
Duncan:
00:49:12
Yeah, no, I think that's the real key thing. Particularly here in the Gulf of Mexico. I mean we talked at the start about how I'm using seeps can tell you whether a basin has hydrocarbons in it or not. Clearly we're decades past the point of knowing whether there's oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico. So even in the deep water gulf of Mexico, especially here in the US side, we know that there's oil and gas, so that information is long gone. We don't, we don't need an update on that anymore. What we need to know is information about the type of oil, the age of the oil, the deep positional environment that the oil is deposited in. And if we can actually get a sample from these seeps, then that's the sort of information that modern geochemistry can start to pull out for us.
Dan:
00:49:57
we've sat in the same meetings where the, the potential client companies have said, why are you, why are you gonna map the deepest part of the Gulf of Mexico? There's no oil out there. And lo and behold, we found anomalous backscatter targets on a diapirs, which are areas, mounds out in the deepest parts of the Gulf of Mexico. And lo and behold, if you, if you look at the data, know that that statement was incorrect. There is oil and gas out there in other parts of the world. We've had companies say, oh, this part's all oil and this part's gas. Well, how do you know that? Well, because we've drilled for oil out here and we don't think there's any oil. Once you get out there and you don't know, you don't know what you don't know until you go map it and sample it and then you come back, you put the data on their desk and they go, huh, hey, we were wrong man. I guess there's oil out there. And, and in other parts of the world where you know, we've done all our exploration close to land or in shallow water, we go out into the deepest part and nobody's ever drilled a well out there. So, you use the seep science to go to basically fill that in.
Dan:
00:51:09
So in order to make money exploring for oil, you had to have organic matter. Originally it had to be, it had to be buried and cooked. Okay. So you needed temperature and pressure. You need time takes time to do that, then it needs to migrate. Okay. With the exception of unconventionals, we're not gonna talk about unconventional today with the exception of unconventionals, the hydrocarbons have to migrate, so they're concentrated so that you can go drill them and recover them. And they need to be in a reservoir.
Dan:
00:51:41
And it has to be sealed. And so when we find a seep and all of that goes into what we talk about in oil exploration as the risk equation, like what's the probability of success? If you don't know whether you have a migration, you have maximum uncertainty and that flows through into your, into your risk. Well, if we find a seep, remember we've proven that there was organic matter. We've proven that it was buried and cooked for the right amount of time to create oil and gas and that it's migrated. We can't tell you anything about reservoir or seal or timing, but we can, we can materially impact the risk equation by finding a seep. Okay. So right before you drill a well, wouldn't you like to know whether or not there's oil or gas in the neighborhood? Cause a well can be a can be $100 million risk.
Dan:
00:52:34
Okay. Usually you wouldn't, wouldn't you like to know? So remember when we started looking at seeps, 1977 for the hot vents 85 for the cold vents, we used human beings in a submersible. Later we shifted to using robotic submersibles where a human being sit on a ship in a control room, operate the ROV with joysticks, and you watch the videos come through. Well, those are great, but they're really expensive and you can't look at much sea floor on any given day because you're limited to how fast you can move across the sea floor and how much you can look at. So if we surveyed 2000 square kilometers in a day, we want to be able to evaluate that in less than 20 years. We want to be able to evaluate that in, you know, in a similar length of time, a day or two. So what we've done is we've shifted toward using what we, what's called a piston core, which, which is a six meter long, 20 foot long tube with about a thousand kilos on a 2,000 pounds.
Dan:
00:53:37
And we lower it through the sea floor, operating it with a winch from a ship. And by putting a navigation beacon on that core, we can track it through the water column in real time. And if we have this high backscatter target on the sea floor, we can lower it to the water column. Once we're about fit and we're within 50 meters, 150 feet of the sea floor, we can see whether we're on target and then we let it go. When the pist- when the, it has a trigger weight on it, you can look this up, how to, how do piston cores work, that the core, lets go and it free falls that last little bit and it penetrates the sea floor. You haul it back to the surface. Now if it had gas hydrate in it, if it has oil in it, if it has gas in it, you can see it right away. when you pull the clear liner out of the core, and there it is, you know, whether or not you've got success, for most cores, there's no visual evidence of hydrocarbons that we sample that core tube, three different samples. One of them, we take a sample into what we call a gas can and seal that. And then we put a couple of hockey puck size chunks of sediment into Ziploc bags and everything goes into the freezer. And you ship that back, from the next port call. And about a month later you get a spreadsheet in your email, that says, oh, guess what you found methane, ethane, propane, butane, and Pentane. And look at this, you've got enough fluorescents that this is a guaranteed oil hit. So, again, you think about the time we map a couple thousand square kilometers a day.
Dan:
00:55:18
We mapped for a month, we'll look the data for a month. We go out and core for a couple of weeks and a month later the Geochemistry starts flowing in. So real quick, multibeam as we've, as we've discussed as a way to get a detailed map of the sea floor, both the shape of it and the hardest roughness, acoustic properties. So any company laying a fiber optic cable across the world's oceans is acquiring multibeam data. Any, municipality that's worried about how deep their ports are and whether there's enough space for the ships to come in, is acquiring multibeam data. The corps of engineers who pays companies to dredge sand in the Mississippi River has to have a before and after multibeam a map, when MH370 went down and needed to be hunted for before they deployed the real high resolution tools. They needed a map of the sea floor and that was a part of the ocean that has never been mapped in detail before.
Dan:
00:56:23
So most of the world's oceans have net have never been mapped in the detail that we're mapping them. We're using the tool to go hunt seeps. But there are all sorts of other uses of, of that multi beam technology. So, what are we looking for when we, when we, when we're looking for seeps, you know, what have, where have people found oil and gas leaking out of the sea floor? What does it look like? Or what are the targets? Well, if the gas burps out of the sea floor, it creates a pockmark. And those are targets, in many parts of the world, the Apennines of Italy, Azerbaijan, there are what we call mud volcanoes, where over pressured mud from deep down in the earth is kind of spewing out gently, slowly and continuously at the earth's surface. And lo and behold, it's bringing up oil and gas along with it. So mud volcanoes are known, oil and gas seeps onshore. Of course we're going to use them, offshore. Any place where we have a fault, you can create fracture permeability that might let oil and gas up. Faults can also seal, but a fault would be a good target, an anticline, a big fold that has a, can have seeps coming out of the crest of, it's similar to the seeps that were discovered early in late 18 hundreds. And in, in the USA, we can have areas where we have oil and gas leaking out of the sea floor, but it's not enough to change the shape of the sea floor. So we get high backscatter but no relief. Those, those are targets. So when we go out and we sample potential seep targets, we don't focus on only one type of target because that might only tell you one thing.
Dan:
00:58:04
So we spread our, our targets around on different target types and we'll spread our targets around an area. Even if we, if we have more targets in one area than another area, we will spread our targets all the way around. Because the one thing that we've learned in decades of seep hunting is we're not as smart as we think we are. Nature always throws a curve ball. And you should, you should not think that you knew, know everything before you go into an area to analyze it because you might, you probably will find something that's, that startles you. And you know, as someone who's been looking at seeps since 1986, I continue to find things that we've never seen before. like our recent projects in the Gulf of Mexico, we found two target types that we've never seen before. The nearest analog on earth, on the surface is called a Pingo, which is when ice forms these really weird mountains up in the Arctic. And the one thing I can guarantee you that's not on the bottom of the world's ocean is an ice mound similar to what's forming the Arctic. But, but it had that shape. So we went and analyzed it and lo and behold, it told us something about the hydrocarbon system.
Dan:
00:59:12
So those are all different types of target types so that the core comes back, we send it to the lab, we get first the very, what call the screening geochemistry, which is a light gases, methane through Pentane. We look at how fluorescent it is, cause that'll tell you whether or not you, you have a chance of of having a big oil hit. And we also look at what's called the chromatogram, which is a gas chromatography. And that tells us between about C15 and C36 C being the carbon length. So the, all your alkanes. And by looking at a Chromatogram, a trained professional will look that and say, oh, that's biodegraded oil. Or, oh, that's really fresh oil cause really fresh oil. All the, alkane peaks get smaller as they get bigger. So it has a very, very distinctive shape. Or they can look at it and they can tell you, you can, you can figure out the depositional environment. You can figure out whether the organic matter came from a lake, lacustrine, or maybe it's marine algal. We can say something about the age of it because flowering plants didn't evolve on earth till about the end of the age of dinosaurs. So at the end of the cretaceous, we got flowering plants. And so flowering plants create a molecule called oleanane. And so if there's no oleanane in the oil, that oil is older than cretaceous. So now we're telling something about a depositional environment.
Dan:
01:00:39
We're saying something about the age, we can say the, the geochemist can say something about the maturity of the oil by looking at the geochemistry data. So all of this information, is now expanding what we know about what's in the subsurface and everything we know about seepage is that it is episodic in time. And it is distributed on earth's surface, not in kind of a random scattered, fashion. You get seepage above above a mud mud volcano, but for the surrounding hundred square kilometers around this mud volcano, we don't find any seep targets. Okay. So, our philosophy is that in order to find, in order to analyze the seats, we have to go find where we've got the highest probability of seepage and leakage. And that's where we target. So if you went out and just dropped a random grid over an area, you have a very, very low chance of hitting a concentrated site of seepage. And so, our hit rate, our success rate is, is high because we're using these biological and chemical indicators of seepage to help us guide where we sample. We have very precisely located sampling instruments this core with this acoustic beacon on it. And so we have, we have a very, very high success rates. And when we get hydrocarbons, we get enough hydrocarbons that we can do all of this advanced geochemistry on it.
Duncan:
01:02:13
That's a good point Dan, even with- even without just doing a random grid of coring, piston coring has been done in the the US Gulf of Mexico for a long time now. And using seismic information, to target it. So like you say, looking for the faults and the anticlines and those type of features and very shallow anomalies on the seismic data. Even even guiding it with that information, typically a, a 5% hit rate might be expected. So you take two or 300 cores you know, you're going to get maybe 5%-10% hit rate, where you can actually look at the oils, and the geochemistry from the samples that you get. Using the multibeam, we were more like a 50 to 60% hit rate. And that's even with like Dan said, we're targeting some features where we know we're not going to find oil. so we could probably do even better than that if we, if we really focused in on finding oil. But obviously we're trying to assemble all the different types of seeps.
Dan:
01:03:11
One of the things that we're asked and that we've heard from managers since we started working in the oil industry is what is this sea floor seep tell me about what's in my reservoir. And there's only, there have been very few, what we, what we call the holy grail studies published where a company has published the geochemistry at the reservoir level and the geochemistry on a seep that they can tie to that reservoir in the Gulf of Mexico. We collected dozens of seeps that can be tied to the same basin where there is known production. So in that Gulf of Mexico Dataset, a company that purchased that data and who had access to the reservoir oils could finally have a sufficient number of correlations that they could answer that question. What is the sea floor seep? Tell me about the reservoir. Because once you're comfortable in the Gulf of Mexico, that that seep is really telling you what's down in your reservoir.
Dan:
01:04:08
Now you go into other parts of the world where you don't know what's in the reservoir before you drill and you find a good, a fresh seep with fresh oil right at the sea floor. Now you're confident that when you go down into the reservoir that you're going to find something, something similar. So let me talk a little bit about other things that you can do with these cores. And I'll start by kind of looking at these mud volcanoes. So this mud volcano, it had over pressured mud at depth. It came up to the surface of the earth and as it came up, it grabbed wall rock on its way up. So by analyzing a mud volcano, if we then go look at, say the microfossils, in all the class in a mud volcano, we can tell you about the age of the rocks that mud volcano came through without ever drilling a well.
Dan:
01:04:54
So you can look at, at the, at the vitrinite reflectance, you can look at the maturity of the, of these wall rocks that are brought to you on the surface. You can look at heavy minerals. And when we go out and we do field geology, you know, you remember you're a geologist has a rock pick they and they go, the geologist goes up to the cliff and, and she or he chips a rock out and they take it back to lab and take a look at it. And that's how they tell something about what's in the outcrop. Well, it's hard to do field geology on the bottom of the ocean using a multibeam map and - acoustically guided core. We can now go and do field work on the, on the ocean floor and expand our knowledge of what's going on in a field area.
Duncan:
01:05:42
So maybe it's worth talking a bit Dan about how we're jointly using these technologies or this group of technologies, at TGS, to put together projects. So the, I think generally the approach has been to look at, basin wide study areas. So we're not just carving off little blocks and doing, one of these, one of these projects over, over a particular block. We'll take on the whole Gulf of Mexico. So we, we broke it up into two. We looked at the Mexico side and the US side. But in total, I think it was nearly a million square kilometers that we covered and, about 1500 cores that I think we took, so we were putting these packages together in different basins all over the world, whether they're in mature basins like the Gulf of Mexico or frontier areas like places we're working in West Africa at the moment. But I think we're, we're looking to put more and more of these projects together. I think the technology applies to lots of different parts of the world. Both this side of the Atlantic and the eastern side of the Atlantic as well.
Dan:
01:06:44
So since 2014, five years, we've mapped, we as in One and TGS have mapped, I believe over 1,250,000 square kilometers. We've acquired over 2000 cores. Oh. We also measure heat flow. We can use - is how the earth is shedding heat. And it's concentrated in some areas in, and you want to know heat flow if you're looking for oil, cause you got to know how much your organic matter has been cooked. So we've, we've collected thousands of cores, at dramatic success rates and we've used them. We've used these projects in areas of known hydrocarbon production, like the shallow water Gulf of Mexico, but we've, we've extended out into areas of completely unknown hydrocarbon production, the deep water Gulf of Mexico, the east coast of Mexico over in the Caribbean. We're looking at northwest Africa, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and the area, that's a jointly operated AGC. And we're looking at other frontier areas where we can apply this to this technology in concert with traditional tools, multichannel, seismic, gravity and magnetics to help, our clients get a better feel for the hydrocarbon prospectivity. You've got to have the seismic cause you've got to see what the subsurface looks like. But the, the multibeam which leads to seep targets, which leads ultimately to the geochemistry is what then affects the risk going forward into a basin.
Duncan:
01:08:20
That's a good point, Dan. We don't see this as a technology that replaces seismic or gravity or magnetics or anything else, but it's another piece in the puzzle. And it's a very complimentary piece as well.
Dan:
01:08:31
It is. And any areas you could argue that probably the best places to go look are where, your colleagues and other companies have said, oh, there's no oil there. Well, how do you know? Well, we don't think there's oil because we don't think there was a organic matter or we don't think that it was cooked enough. Well, you don't know until you go there and you find, so if you found one seep in that field area that had live oil and gas in it, you would know that that premise was incorrect. And now you have a competitive edge, you have knowledge that others don't and that can, that can affect your exploration, strategy in your portfolio. we haven't talked about cost. Multi beam is arguably one of the least expensive tools per square kilometer in the geophysical toolkit. Just because we don't need chase boats. We're not towing the streamer, we're going 10 knots. We're covering a couple of thousand square kilometers a day. So it's, it's, it's a tool that's useful in frontier exploration. It is complimentary to seismic, and it's a tool that, that you can use to guide where you want to spend money and how much money if you, if we survey a huge area and let's say half of it has no evidence of oil and gas and half of it has excellent hydrocarbon seeps, both oil and gas. I would argue that as a company you might want to spend less money on the first and more money on the second. You might not want to spend zero because there's always a chance you might want to take a look at it. But this tool is, we're kind of the leading edge of the sphere that can be used to go in and open up a new basin, and see whether or not there's oil, there's oil and gas there.
Dan:
01:10:21
Well Erica and Duncan, thanks for having me today.
Erica:
01:10:28
Our pleasure.
Dan:
01:10:29
It's been an interesting discussing arcane subjects like bacteria, seep organisms and sea floor mapping and multibeam and tying it all back into oil and gas exploration. I want to take a minute to thank TGS for this podcast and for, their collaboration and support over the years. And I should mention that we have, we've been acquiring the seafloor mapping data with, companies like Fugro and TDI Brooks with equipment, designed by Kongsberg. I want to thank my partners in One, John Decker and Phil Tees. And on the geochemistry side, I've got to give a nod to Bernie Bernard for, patiently answering my questions and our colleagues over at GeoMark for the biomarker work. For biology, Chuck Fisher has again, patiently answered all of my questions about how seeps work and for Paleo seeps, Kathy Campbell. And I do want to thank a the US Navy's office of naval research for decades of sponsoring this type of work, and, and allowing us as a, as a kind of an academic community to take these really, again, arcane science issues. But then to take them and apply them to, the really exciting work of oil and gas exploration.
Duncan:
01:11:42
Thanks for coming by Dan. It's always a pleasure.
Erica:
01:11:46
Thank you both. It's been a great conversation
Dan:
01:11:48
And who knows where we're going to map next...
