For TenzorGEO, it all started with academics who had a vision, a group of physicists with a background in passive seismology research. Looking to commercialise their work, they researched how their expertise in low frequency seismic studies could be applied to locate hydrocarbon reservoirs. It was a very challenging task because they were ahead of their time: the concept of Big Data, large libraries of data to play with, and supercomputers powerful enough to perform complex calculations were yet to come. Equally importantly, the oil and gas sector had no understanding or faith in the technology and subsequently there was no demand for it.
By the time the first commercial passive seismic technology came to the market in the early 1990s, conventional active seismic has already become the dominant method for hydrocarbons exploration and appraisal. Prevailing beliefs were based on the subsurface ray theory in optical geometry narrative. The mainstream idea that shorter waves (higher frequencies) were more informative, and high oil prices put pressure on most players to continue using tried and tested methods, instead of exploring an innovative but unfamiliar passive seismic technology.
Despite the setbacks, the LFS technology eventually received funding from a Eurasian supermajor in 2000s, which allowed its developers to accumulate the field data from the growing base of clients. Slowly but surely, the technology gained traction and market acclaim due to its very high success rate, ease of application and moderate cost.
Over the years, as experience of the team grew, and more data was collected from the field, it was decided to extend the application of the passive seismic to monitoring of microseismic events, either induced or naturally occurring, and the Full Waveform Location technology was brought to the market. Both technologies were successfully deployed in hundreds of onshore projects, and in 2018 TenzorGEO decided to extend their application to offshore sector worldwide.
Whilst both of TenzorGEO’s passive seismic technologies deliver high success rate, ease of application and moderate cost benefits to our customers, the methods are very different in nature and address a wide range of tasks in a range of industries. Please click below to learn more about our technologies in more detail.