Paper Summary
The 2021 update to the Nigerian Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) has sparked a surge in exploration activity in the deepwater Niger Delta, particularly within the lesser explored shale diapir zone where imaging of complex mobile shale structures has historically proven challenging. Acquisition of approximately 11,500 km2 3D seismic data in 2024 marks the first modern multi-client 3D seismic acquisition offshore Nigeria in over a decade. The seismic data for this case study were acquired with a triple source, 10 streamers single-sensor configuration, with each streamer being 10 km in length.
Gravity and magnetic data were recorded during the same multi-client seismic acquisition program. A state-of-the-art seismic processing and model building workflow, which included Dynamic Matching Full Waveform Inversion (Mao et al, 2020), was used in conjunction with
gravity and magnetic modelling to build a geologically plausible velocity model over the entire area.