CGG announced today the start of a large broadband 3D multi-client survey in the pre-salt area of the deepwater Santos Basin. Santos VII (Saturno) is the third phase in CGG’s most ambitious pre-salt project to date, collectively known as the Santos Basin Trilogy. The project is designed to make ultramodern seismic datasets available as quickly as possible to support each phase in the pre-salt evaluation process in anticipation of Brazil’s next pre-salt licensing round.

Santos VII (Saturno) will cover an area of over 13,900 km2, including the highly prospective Saturno prospect, a major pre-salt opportunity with no 3D seismic coverage to date. The BroadSeis™ dataset will be acquired in two phases between September 2016 and June 2017 and processed in CGG's Rio de Janeiro Subsurface Imaging center to provide state-of-the-art broadband images of Saturno using full-waveform inversion (FWI) technology. Fast-track products for the first phase will be available in spring 2017 and final products for both phases will be available in summer 2018.

The two other components of the Santos Basin Trilogy project are Galaxy and Constellation. Galaxy is a 3D migrated grid covering approximately 34,000 km2 extracted from CGG’s legacy Cluster and Cluster Extension surveys that offers industry players a quick regional evaluation of the Santos Basin. Constellation is a 23,750 km2 reprocessing project designed to upgrade these surveys with the latest subsurface imaging technology, including 3D deghosting, bandwidth extension and TTI FWI velocity model building, to provide detailed broadband pre-salt images. Santos VII (Saturno) will form a bridge to link these two reprocessed datasets to CGG’s existing BroadSeis surveys, Santos VI-B and Campos II, creating a unique 75,000 km2 dataset in this region.

Jean-Georges Malcor, CEO, CGG, said: “CGG already owns the industry’s largest 3D multi-client library in the highly prospective Santos Basin. With our Santos Basin Trilogy project, which has Santos VII (Saturno) as its cornerstone, CGG is again taking the lead in building powerful exploration datasets that will play a pivotal role in supporting Brazil’s future licensing rounds. We expect these survey products to provide more detailed images which will unlock the hidden potential waiting to be discovered deep within the complex Santos Basin.”