Our GXT Denver office (originally ‘born’ as AXIS Geophysical) has earned a well deserved reputation as the home of the ‘go-to guys’ for fracture detection in complex shale plays. We’ve served clients for years in the Barnett and, more recently, in the Haynesville, Bakken, Marcellus, and Fayetteville shales. Our Denver office serves clients not only in North America, but around the world. Among other successes, our work on the XinChang fractured reservoir in China is especially notable.
Our original calling card was a processing technique called AZIM, championed by SEG Award winner (and ION’s own) Ed Jenner. This technique, including additional enhancements to it since it was first introduced more than five years ago, provides GXT geophysicists with a means of determining the relative velocity of seismic waves as they travel parallel to (fast) and against (slow) the primary orientation of fractures in the subsurface.
Mark Wallace of our Denver office just narrated a terrific, readily approachable PowerPoint on the topic of fractured reservoirs, including actual case applications from the Barnett that show how geophysical insights can help optimize both well placement and hydraulic fracturing decisions.
Illizi Basin, Algeria
Mark talks about the move towards long-offset, full-azimuth land acquisition and how this emerging survey geometry helps improve fracture detection. In a separate narrated Powerpoint, Alex Calvert of our Denver office explains how long-offset, full-azimuth surveys also enable processing to be conducted using a technique that involves offset-vector tiles (OVT), a cutting-edge method that delivers new levels of insight and clarity into the subsurface.
ION-GXT is applying OVT processing to the multi-client Durham Ranch, Colorado dataset acquired using FireFly. According to one oil company geoscientist that has seen the results, the “data are spectacular.” We’ll share more about this in a future post.
You can learn more about our Denver office by watching the recently completed video in which office members discuss their work and accomplishments.