How a fracking boom startup is taking its seismic science into the climate change era
Summary
And that preceding decade had been one during which the company, which performs subsurface monitoring using passive seismic technology, had grown up amid the boom in U.S. oilfield hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, and which by 2013, was about to go bust in a major way. Helping energy companies perform environmentally sensitive geological exploration was a core focus, with its approach more like a stethoscope, Duncan says, compared to the conventional technology of the time, seismic vibrators, which he says worked more like an ultrasound. Thats become 20%-25% of the companys income over the past few years as sites from industrial operations to residential complexes, airport runways and hotels, look to seismic monitoring as a way to spot sinkholes before catastrophe. As management in the oil and gas industry changes, and energy transition sectors are built from the ground up, Microseismic needs to be well-equipped in an area of science that isnt in its roots: machine learning and AI. And as in many industries, if it works it will be better, faster and cheaper, with pattern recognition and machine learning enabling whats already being done in seismic monitoring, and in real time, and more fully using the power embedded in the data.