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Improving the quality of seismic images could take the risk out of drilling for oil reserves and reduce exploration costs that are picked up by consumers.

Traditional methods for locating oil underground do not produce the kind of high-quality images that oil companies require to make important decisions about where to drill.

And if a company drills and comes up dry, the lost exploration costs ultimately are passed on to consumers.

With oil prices climbing, anything that can help lower production costs is welcome. The Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems Network (MITACS) has taken up the challenge by bringing together experts from entirely different fields.

Two University of Calgary professors – Dr. Gary Margrave, of the Department of Geology and Geophysics, and Dr. Michael Lamoureux, from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics – are leading a MITACS project to build improved seismic imaging algorithms to better illustrate the Earth's subsurface.

This unique collaboration is allowing researchers in mathematics and geology to combine their knowledge. Along with the work being done at the University of Calgary, MITACS has linked geophysicists from the University of Alberta and the University of British Columbia with mathematicians from York University in Toronto and l'Université de Montréal. The project also involves American researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Texas at Austin.

Ultimately, their work will make the search for oil a more exact art.

Before MITACS, these researchers might never have come together to pool their talents to solve such an important resource industry problem. "The NCE program is unique in how you can access teams of researchers," says Dr. Lamoureux. "It is also exclusive in how it supports international collaboration."

Methods exist to produce seismic images, but they need improvement. Seismic images are created from vibrations (seismic waves) that are bounced off objects, processed through a computer program and transformed into a picture of the subsurface. When inputting the wave data in the computer, many obstacles obscure the ability to see the target – in this case, oil.

Drs. Margrave and Lamoureux have applied novel mathematics to computer imaging programs to enable better interpretation of the waves to illustrate what lies underground. Having already achieved some success – the team has made a presentation to the Canadian Society of Exploration Geophysicists – the researchers are continuing to apply mathematics to improve the quality of the images created. "It is only with more complex mathematical calculations that this problem will get closer to being solved," says Dr. Margrave.

The project involves many industry partners including BP Canada, the Consortium for Research in Elastic Wave Exploration Seismology, GEDCO, Geo-X System Ltd., Lockheed Martin Canada, Imperial Oil Resources, Sensor Geophysical Ltd., and Veritas DGC Inc.

Early this year Dr. Lamoureux and York University researcher Dr. Peter Gibson took part in a conference in Vienna, where they met with Austrian seismic researchers. In turn, the Austrians arranged to visit Canada. Last year, three researchers from the MITACS project went to Singapore to meet with colleagues there.

"When we travel to other countries, we swap knowledge – we listen and learn what they know, and teach them what we know," says Dr. Lamoureux. "The NCE program is the only supporter of these kinds of collaborations. It allows for several researchers on a project to meet with other international researchers, and then it continues to support the collaborations by funding networking opportunities like workshops and summer schools."

Dr. Lamoureux also praises MITACS for supporting the addition of more students in research projects, which he says has greatly benefited their research.

"With a network like MITACS, we have the human resources to do much more research." he says. "We can undertake more things like patent applications and produce software for use in industry. Also, our level of activity and the number of products we are developing has gone up a great amount."

www.mitacs.ca