Fiber Optic Permanent Seismic System for Increased Hydrocarbon Recovery

Permanent seismic installations at the sea-floor have emerged as a potential tool for oil companies in their work to actively monitor oil/gas flows and injection processes in order to increase hydrocarbon recovery and optimize production. The advantage of fiber optic over electric sensors is that the fiber optic sensor technology is completely passive at the wet-end, i.e. no short circuits will happen, longer life-time of components, high sensitivity, high dynamic range, less intrinsic noise, no corrosion of sensing components, fewer parts and potentially cheaper complete receiver systems. Large fiber optical ocean-bottom receiver systems for 4D-applications, can now be produced and installed at locations where the oil companies would like to exploit the life-of-field seismic concept. We are advocating optical sensing technology to be an important part of the tool box for the oil companies in their work to implement the instrumented oil field in a cost efficient way.