KMS Technologies' staff has been involved in developing many geophysical systems for land, airborne, marine and borehole applications.  Our present company focus includes ElectroMagnetic (EM) systems such as Magnetotellurics (MT)  and Long Offset Transient ElectroMagnetics (LOTEM or Lotem) systems, both land and marine as well as borehole EM systems for LWD and geosteering applications.

Marine ElectroMagnetics:

• Technology overview

• Vision

• Services

• Products

• Our consultants

Technology overview

During the last years marine electromagnetic (EM) measurements have become an important tool in the exploration of hydrocarbon reservoirs. Physically the detection of a reservoir is based on the resistivity contrast of the resistive reservoir to its conductive surrounding. Time variant magnetic fields of either natural or artificial origin cause eddy currents within the conductive sediment layers. As these eddy currents are time variant as well they cause a secondary EM-field that can be sensed with magnetic or electric sensors placed on the sea floor or sea surface.

The effectiveness of EM-methods in hydrocarbon detection strongly depends on the source. In the magnetotelluric (MT) method natural fields are used as source and therefore only a receiver measuring horizontal electric and magnetic fields is needed to do the measurements. However in a layered subsurface the natural field induces only horizontally flowing eddy currents. Such current systems are good to detect conductive layers but insensitive to the resistive hydrocarbon reservoir itself. To overcome this limitation artificial fields with a vertical current path are combined with the MT receivers. This vertical current flow causes charge buildups at the reservoir boundaries that allow detecting the resistive layers. This method is known as controlled source magnetotellurics (CSMT). A different interpretation approach for the same data sets using the individual transmitter receiver configuration of the electrical field components has proven to be extremely useful in hydrocarbon detection and is called controlled source electromagnetics (CSEM) or frequency domain CSEM (fCSEM) . This method has much in common with the well known DC methods used onshore. For each source receiver offset one gets one amplitude value and the interpretation is based on the variation of the amplitudes with offset. Although very successful, CSMT does not use the full potential of marine EM. As the responses depend not only on offset but also on frequency additional information can be gathered if instead of a single frequency a wide distribution of frequencies is used. This is realized in the time domain CSEM or tCSEM^TM method developed by KMS-Technologies. By working in time domain a transient containing information over a large depth range is recorded at each transmitter receiver offset. In addition the sensitivity to certain targets is increased and other typical limitations of traditional fCSEM methods as for example the loss of sensitivity in shallow water deployments is reduced.

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Vision

Our long term vision is to take EM in general and tCSEM™ in special in the permanent water/steam flood monitoring market as well as to establish it as a routine tool in hydrocarbon exploration. On this path we have developed various products and offer different kind of services.

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Services

• Survey planning
  • Based on our 3D modeling capabilities for tCSEM™, fCSEM and MT we are happy to assist oil companies in the planning phase of marine EM surveys. Integration of reservoir information from seismic, well logs and other sources can be done on a high level of detail. Through comparison of different scenarios an optimum survey strategy is developed for each individual project.
• Data processing
  • Our own modeling capabilities allow us to offer data processing services for different methods.
• Interpretation
  • We interpret marine EM data sets based on 1D, 2D and 3D inversion techniques including constrains given by borehole or seismic information.
• On board data acquisition QA/QC

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Products

Marine Induction Coil (MIC) 121: This induction coil magnetometer has been developed specially for the use in fCSEM measurements. It’s compact size and moderate weight reduces the space of the ocean bottom receiver and the necessary volume of floating units. Please call for additional information.

Additional Information about Marine Induction Coil (MIC) 121

IX1D-Marine software. IX1D is a software package for Window, which allows forward and inverse modeling of resistivity data, with or without IP (Induced Polarization). IX1D also models MT, Frequency EM and EM conductivity data from Horizontal and Vertical Coplanar and Vertical Coaxial arrays. IX1D Marine can handle anisotropy and up scaling. TEM data is supported as well for additional license cost.

We also sell the entire product line of Interpex Limited, for more information about their products visit them at www.interpex.com

Land Induction Coil (LIC) 120: The induction coil magnetometer has been developed to measure variations of the Earth’s magnetic field, particularly for applications in Magnetotellurics (MT).  It covers a wide frequency range from 0.0001 Hz up to 1,000 Hz.  It can be used both autonomously with any analog registration unit and as a part of the magnetotelluric station. The magnetometer shows low-noise characteristics, extremely low temperature drift of input offset voltage and offset current and a very stable transfer function over temperature and time.

Additional Information about Land Induction Coil (LIC) 120     

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If you are interested in this or other products please contact us at Info@kmstechnologies.com or call us.