Energy is vital to our daily lives.
And as the world's thirst for energy
continues to grow,
the challenge is to meet
this growing demand
in responsible and innovative ways.
This is the story of how Shell is
helping to meet this challenge.
The Shelburne Basin, Nova Scotia.
It's here that Shell are
searching for oil and gas,
and to help them in their quest,
they are deploying,
for the first time in Canada,
the very latest in
exploration technology;
3D wide azimuth.
One way that I try to explain
wide azimuth to people is,
suppose you were going to look
at the Washington Monument.
If you wanted to really understand
the shape of the monument
you'd want to be able
to walk around it.
You'd want to be able to look
at it from different directions.
In conventional 3D seismic,
you look at it from one direction,
whereas in the wide azimuth you look
at it from different directions
so you're able to march around it
and look at it from different angles.
And that's what allows you to
ultimately construct a better image
that leads to a better geologic
interpretation, and, hopefully,
in this case we hope to trap some
accumulations of hydrocarbons.
We have pre-existing 2D data
from surveys
that have been done in the area,
but they don't really provide us
with enough confidence
to select the best drilling location.
So we go back out,
we'll now do the wide azimuth
which is a new technology,
and we hope it'll give us
the best possible chance of finding
the appropriate drilling locations
and making a discovery.
The optimal drilling location
could be anywhere
within the series of blocks for which
Shell has a licence to explore.
They cover 19,895 square kilometres.
In this particular experiment
we're going to have 12 streamers,
and they'll be 8 kilometres
in length,
so it'll be about 96km of streamers
being pulled by this vessel.
The streamers are deployed
off the boat.
They have a receiver
every 3.125 metres,
so that's a huge number of
hydrophones on the thing.
You also tow a seismic source,
and that source puts energy
into the water column.
It reflects off the geology at depth,
and then it's returned and
recorded on the streamers,
and then starts a very long process
of QC-ing that recording
to make sure that
everything is going well,
and that's what's done
in this part of the boat.
And ultimately then
it's processed to an image
that geologists and geophysicists
can interpret,
and, in this case,
look for oil and gas.
We're trying to image very
steep-walled salt,
salt that's overhung, it's very
complex, a very complex subsurface,
and you need the ability to collect
data from a lot of different azimuths
in order to build that image.
The data quality from
the wide azimuth 3D,
is a huge step improvement,
so we're obviously hoping that
we see that same step change
in imaging
which will enable us to pick that
sweet spot for the drill location.
The data is then analysed by Shell
geophysicists in Houston, Texas.
The first thing we do is
we map all the major sequences,
so this is the structure map
of the water bottom
and the bigger map in the background
is made from the 2D data
and these three -you can probably
judge from the shape -
is mapped from the 3D.
Just from the look of it, on the
3D map you see a lot more detail.
On 2D data it would take a full week
to actually map it around,
but for 3D data we're able to do it
in half a day.
It's really critical to have
this kind of product
early on in the venture
so we were able to speed up
their drilling campaigns,
speed up the entire timeline.
It's a highly complex operation
on a vast scale.
The vessels for this project
have been mobilised
from various parts of the world,
so bringing a fleet of
4 seismic vessels into Canada
and getting them here all on
the same day is quite a challenge.
Oh, it's very impressive,
I haven't seen anything like it.
I mean, it's my first time
on a seismic ship.
The amount of work and
the amount of technology
on these boats is just amazing.
This is maybe the third time
I've been on one in my career
and I'm always astounded at
how things have improved
over the time before
I was last on a ship.
So the technology's evolving
so rapidly.
It's just really incredible,
actually.
Shell also wanted to make sure that
this new seismic technology
was used in an environmentally
responsible way.
The very nature of seismic work
is that it puts sound
in the marine environment,
and there have been various studies,
none of them particularly conclusive,
about whether that's harmful
to marine species or not.
Certainly, the company are aware
of the need to be careful
with marine mammals, but there are
other fish and species in the ocean
that may or may not
be affected by seismic noise.
So it's uncertain whether or not
seismic activity is harmful
to some of these species.
It's got to be done;
you won't find the oil and gas
resources without it.
So we understand that from
the fishing industry perspective.
Obviously, it's a new area.
There's a lot of environmental
concerns, so over the past year
we've had to produce an environmental
assessment to demonstrate,
both to Shell and to the regulator,
of course,
that everything we are proposing
conforms with Canadian
environmental requirements
and, of course, Shell's own
environmental requirements.
One of the things I'm especially
proud of is
we went and did acoustic modelling to
better understand the seismic source,
how it propagates in
the water column,
how it propagates differently
in the summer than it does, say,
in the spring or the fall, and we've
tried to include all of those things
in our environmental assessment
so that we have the least amount of
impact on marine life that we can.
This ship's got a green passport and
they called us a green class vessel.
Nothing goes overboard
from this vessel,
that's first of all company policy
- nothing to be thrown overboard.
On conventional vessels,
let's say when you do
the cooling of the engines,
the water goes overboard.
Here, warm water goes
through the coolers,
and the water from the outside
is cooling the calorifers.
So nothing is going into the ocean.
The emission from the funnel is
almost completely clean
and on top of that,
every project we go into
we have mammal observers and
a passive monitor as well
so we can see what's on the surface
and we can see
what's underwater as well.
First and foremost,
we're not going to do anything
if we don't believe it's safe.
So safety is more than a priority,
it's a core value for us.
If we can't ensure that our plans
are focused on no harm to people,
the environment, the assets,
we just don't want to do it.
But what they did want to do
was create opportunities
for local communities.
Economic development and resource
development go hand in hand
and the Aboriginal people welcome
economic development
as part of their growth
within society,
and having lived a marginalised life
for many years,
for many different reasons,
the development of
oil and gas exploration
is a very important factor to them,
and when you see corporations
coming in, like Shell,
taking the time to engage
the community, that's welcoming,
because it shows that there's
an open hand - an extended hand.
The guiding principle here is
that we want to have
full and fair opportunity
for Nova Scotians.
So the way that we provide
local benefits
comes in a lot of different ways.
It comes in projects like this
where you're having supplies
come to the vessel,
the food, the fuel,
those kinds of things.
It also comes in terms of
employing people,
so having people on these vessels
that are principally Nova Scotian,
we hope, but also Canadian
in the larger sense.
So we try to work with all
the communities as well
to try to make this
a positive experience for everybody.
I see it as an opportunity
for some of our younger Mi'kmaq
people that are well-educated
and I see also an opportunity for the
children that are in the schools now
in trying to train them
to work in this field.
It would be interesting to have
Shell at career fairs
where the communities
gather all their students
and they come in and look at
opportunities and careers
that they might be interested in.
This move by Shell, by being
very transparent and open,
in the beginning is
a very important move.
I think it sets a new bar
for how to do business.
The seismic survey, the largest
of its kind carried out by Shell,
was successfully completed
a year ahead of schedule.
In only 88 days,
over 10,000 square kilometres
of seismic data was collected.
It's still too early to know whether
Shell will be successful
in its quest for oil,
as the data is still being analysed.
However, Shell is proud of how
it's doing business in Nova Scotia.
I think about the things
that I learned
that you could do back in university,
say 25 years ago.
These were things that we had hoped
to accomplish maybe one day,
and now we're doing them,
and we're doing them routinely.
And so the evolution within
the whole seismic imaging thing,
it's just been an absolute
step change.
Things in the industry are just
moving so quickly,
and Shell typically wants to be
at the forefront of that move.
If there's new technology around,
we want to be demonstrated as being
the people who are putting
that technology to use,
making those innovations
and reaping the benefits from them.
It takes incredible coordination,
careful planning
but I have tremendous pride in
the work and commitment we have
to make sure things are done,
both with excellence but
also with total commitment
to making sure that
things are done safely,
but in a way that I think will make
us all proud as employees,
and will make the communities
we serve
very proud to have Shell
as their partners.
We have great hopes that this is
going to be a successful survey,
and that's what why we've invested
so much in this technology
to make sure that
we're throwing everything we can
to get the best possible result.
