Industry Challenges & Opportunity

There is a pressing need in exploration for new technology that:

• Increases the certainty of discovery
• Identifies new resource opportunities
• Improves the time to market
• Lowers overall exploration costs

Easy discoveries have been made. The IEA (International Energy Agency) estimates the world will need to spend over $1 trillion per year to bring on new supplies of oil. Much of this will be directed towards deeper and more challenging and complex geology, where new technology such as the Gedex HD-AGG can. greatly assist imaging. Although airborne gravity gradiometry has been used since the mid 1980s, existing systems appear to have reached their technological limits and still do not provide a defining
signal.

All current commercial gravity gradiometer systems are derived from Lockheed Martin technology. This technology was initially designed for use in a submarine, and not designed to achieve the resolution needed for resource exploration. The Gedex HD-AGG was designed from first principles to achieve performance beyond systems deployed today – performance that can enable discovery.

Major corporations that modelled the gravitational signatures of important targets of interest defined this performance to be:

High Sensitivity

Gravity gradient error variance less than 1 Eotvos (E)/√Hz; and

High Spatial Resolution

Data acquisition sampling at the 1 Eotvos (E)/√Hz noise level every second (approximately 60 metres
spatial resolution for data collected from an aircraft); and

Operability Under Typical Survey Conditions

High accuracy and high spatial resolution maintained even in moderate turbulent conditions.

The impact on exploration can be seen in some two-dimensional examples below. Gedex technology also has a dramatic impact on 3D inversion and provides the capability to improve seismic imaging through better velocity models more accurately imaging salt bodies. Please contact us for further information
applicable to your exploration requirements.