Hardware
EM Technology for Land & Marine applications
KMS Technologies focuses on complete system solutions which include hardware, software and training. We also provide 3D interpretation software and access to our cluster for those clients that do not have their own.
In addition, KMS Technologies provides boutique land and marine non-seismic (electromagnetic and gravity) acquisition services to the oil and geothermal industry. With our new hardware and relationship with global acquisition contractors we handle any number of magnetotelluric (MT) sites per year and one special project crew. Marine systems/surveys are done as collaborative projects. In this area, KMS has patented technology.
Electromagnetic methods describe the Earth’s resistivity from shallow to depths as great as 6 km. They include natural-source EM (magnetotellurics, MT) and controlled-source electromagnetic (tCSEM™ for marine, and Lotem for land applications).
As a technology company, we usually provide training services or work with alliance partners in the oil and geothermal industry. We offer land magnetotellurics (MT) and Lotem data acquisition, EM data processing and interpretation services, including 3-D magnetotelluric (MT) data inversion. Integrating magnetotellurics (MT) with seismic has significant benefits in basins where seismic imaging is challenged by over-thrusting salt or basalt.
Our track record as KMS Technologies (our staff has extensive prior experience on five continents)
- Largest commercial sub-salt imaging survey in Germany 2002
- Advisory land MT survey in Libya 2006
- First commercial tCSEM™ survey for major oil company
- 2-D and 3-D geothermal survey in Iceland 2007
- 2-D and 3-D MT/gravity surveys in Hungary since 10/2007 that resulted in successful geothermal well discovery
- 3-D Geothermal survey on some islands, Greece 2009
- MT on a seismic crew with Geokinetics, Brazil (2009)
- West Texas defining water sweet spots in aquifer for Apache (2014)(Unconventional water production)
- Thailand - reservoir monitoring pilot (PTTEP)(2016)
- Malaysia MT-Easy training program 2017 in Sabah
- North Dakota: CarbonSAFE - CCS monitoring - largest pilot site in the world (2020)
Please visit our Technology Library (Info Archive) and Press Releases for updated information on this work.
KMS Technologies is in the training alliance with FACT Company. To learn more about FACT, please visit fact-corp.com
Land and marine CSEM & MT
KMS Technologies' staff has been involved in developing many geophysical systems for land, airborne, marine and borehole applications. Our present company focus integrates seismic with ElectroMagnetic (EM) systems such as Magnetotellurics (MT) and Long Offset Transient ElectroMagnetics (LOTEM or Lotem) systems, both land and marine as well as borehole EM systems for LWD and geosteering applications.
Land electromagnetics see our company brochure for more details.
Land electromagnetics is our standard product line. Our MT system are in use in >24 countries since 2010. We added in 2015 CSEM high power transmitter and are presently working on survey preparation USA and Saudi Arabia.
The receivers are based on our ARRAY SYSTEM.
Marine ElectroMagnetics
KMS has developed a marine cabled-based acquisition system for tighter acquisition and appraisal and production applications. The tCSEM ocean bottom cable system will record both electric and magnetic field measurements and will provide denser sensor spacing than is typically afforded by nodal systems alone.
Dense sensor spacing is particularly important since lateral resolution of the method is scalable to it. In other words, the denser the receiver spacing, the better your lateral resolution and the integration with single well and borehole-to-surface measurements. As the cable system has a very high degree of precision for positioning repeated deployments and will advance the use of EM technology for reservoir monitoring through the acquisition of time lapse surveys. Additionally, the system will feature buoy based recording and real time quality control of data, and is deployable with VSO seismic cable system to provide a direct integration with the seismic method.
Technology overview Vision Services Products
Technology overview
During the last few years marine electromagnetic (EM) measurements have become an important tool in the exploration of and production of hydrocarbon reservoirs. Physically, the detection of a reservoir is based on the resistivity contrast of the resistive reservoir to its conductive surrounding. Time variant magnetic fields of either natural or artificial origin cause eddy currents within the sediment layers. As these eddy currents are time variant as well they cause a secondary EM-field that can be sensed with magnetic or electric sensors placed on the sea floor or sea surface.
The effectiveness of EM-methods in hydrocarbon detection strongly depends on the source. In the MT method, natural fields are used as source, and therefore only a receiver measuring horizontal electric and magnetic fields is needed to do the measurements. However in a layered subsurface, the natural field induces only horizontally flowing eddy currents. Such current systems are good at detecting conductive layers, but insensitive to the resistive hydrocarbon reservoir itself. To overcome this limitation, artificial fields with a vertical current path are combined with the MT receivers. This vertical current flow causes charge buildups at the reservoir boundaries that allow the detection of the resistive layers. This method is known as controlled source magnetotellurics (CSMT).
A different interpretation approach using the artificial source in a different manner has proven to be extremely useful in hydrocarbon detection; this is called controlled source electromagnetics (CSEM). In the most common application, their source is a continuous square wave of selected frequency; this is frequency domain CSEM (fCSEM) . This method has much in common with the well known DC methods used onshore. At each source-receiver offset, the amplitude and phase is measured and the interpretation is based on the variation of these with offset.
Although very successful, fCSEM does not use the full potential of marine EM. The subsurface signal is always weak, so (just as in seismic) it is best to record it while the source is off. This is realized in the time domain CSEM or tCSEM™ method developed by KMS Technologies. By working in time domain, with an impulsive source, a transient is recorded which contains information over a large depth range at each source-receiver offset. By these means, the sensitivity to certain targets is increased, and other typical limitations of traditional fCSEM methods (as for example the loss of sensitivity in shallow water deployments) are reduced.
Vision
Our long term vision is to take EM in general and tCSEM™ in particular a routine tool in hydrocarbon exploration and production, seen by everybody as a valuable complement to seismic. Beyond exploration, we see the market for monitoring of water and steam-flooding, particularly via installation of permanent arrays as a major growth opportunity. Toward this goal, we have developed various products and offer different kinds of services, as described below.
Services
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Survey planning: Based on our 3-D modeling capabilities for tCSEM™, fCSEM and MT we are happy to assist oil companies in the planning phase of marine EM surveys. Integration of reservoir information from seismic, well logs and other sources can be done on a high level of detail. Through comparison of different scenarios an optimum survey strategy is developed for each individual project.
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Data processing: Our own modeling capabilities allow us to offer data processing services for different methods.
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Interpretation: We interpret marine EM data sets based on 1-D, 2-D and 3-D inversion techniques including constraints given by borehole or seismic information.
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On board data acquisition QA/QC
Products
(Please call or write to info@kmstechnologies.com for additional information.)Our products are described on our Product and Services pages. Technical documentation data sheet are given in our technical archive. We also provide training courses (CLICK for details)