TOWARDS OPTIMAL SURVEY DESIGN: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY PROPOSING SMART SOLUTIONS TO SOME CHALLENGES OF SEISMIC DATA ACQUISITION.

Survey design is a critical component of the success of any exploration or development project. The aim of designing seismic surveys is to collect a sufficient amount of data to image the target in the available time and within the financial plan. This thesis gives a comprehensive account of the use of seismic modeling techniques as a powerful tool that helps to reach an optimum survey design through computing theoretical seismograms for given geological models of the subsurface using specific acquisition parameters. In this dissertation, 2D and 3D seismic synthetic models were generated and then processed with the same parameters to deliver a comparison of the final PSTM images and tell what to expect from the 2D and 3D seismic acquisitions in terms of imaging of different faults and detections of their actual positions in the subsurface. Three 2D seismic lines with different orientations were acquired to investigate how the line orientation affects the final image. One such line is a crooked line that was used to understand the impact of binning geometry on the results. The study showed that the results obtained through 2D seismic are highly dependent on the orientation of the line relative to the strike of the structure, and if the line was acquired straight or subjected to a bend somewhere. Moreover, out-of-plane noise is expected in 2D seismic. On the other hand, 3D seismic demonstrated higher accuracy than 2D and does not show any kind of out-of-plane noises. Additionally, it always gives a result that is very close to the initial subsurface model no matter how the survey is oriented.