CREATE AND MAINTAIN A NATIONAL ACTIVE ARCHIVE OF SURFACE REFLECTION SEISMIC AND OTHER GEOPHYSICAL DATA

Billions of dollars of legacy 2D and 3D seismic reflection data have been acquired by the oil and gas industry over the past 100 years. This data is expensive, often impossible to replace, and access limited to the owners’ discretion but represents new data for academic researchers, policy makers, and regulators. The need to characterize large areas of the subsurface for CO2 sequestration and hazard prediction for waste injection requires ready access to legacy data. These critical applications will not be plausible without highly reduced access costs for the data. We propose establishing a permanent consortium for accession, archive, and access of legacy seismic data for research applications.

While the DoE-supported National Geoscience Data Repository System (NGDRS) from 1995-2003 successfully transferred cores, cuttings, logs and reports, and some seismic data to various academic and state institutions, it lapsed due to lack of funding. The NGDRS struggled with the transfer of seismic data as the data’s value was underrecognized by E&P management until they investigated replacement costs, and they were focused on its high storage costs.

Technological advances make old data new, powered by advances in data analytic techniques and new application spaces. A central repository for access to the wealth of seismic data could be made available at low cost to researchers to support hazardous waste disposal in deep wells, resource, and hazard studies, and scoping and characterizing the subsurface for CO2 sequestration. A robust geologic framework is critical for sequestering CO2 and safely injecting wastewater into geologic horizons. Without the proper geologic models, unintended consequences from these activities are a real risk. A trained workforce and reliable data access are the challenges for critical use of old data to address our emerging challenges.