Effectiveness of Reprocessed Legacy 2D Seismic for Regional Evaluation: Examples from the Southern Browse Basin.

2D seismic data are important for regional subsurface evaluation. Legacy 2D seismic data broadly covers the Southern Browse Basin, however, its quality is suboptimal. The significant cost of seismic acquisition, restrictions on shooting areas and a challenging-approvals environment means that reprocessing may be a more cost effective and timely solution compared to acquisition. To confirm the benefit of new seismic acquisition against reprocessing of existing seismic data, local examples are needed to optimize seismic strategies. INPEX Corporation acquired new 2D seismic and reprocessed legacy seismic in the southern Browse Basin in an area of both shallow-water depth and shallow basement. A similar processing sequence was applied to both data sets. Visual comparison shows that the newly acquired seismic data has higher resolution but similar imaging to the reprocessed seismic data. Despite the uplift in subsurface imaging from the new seismic data, the ease of picking main regional seismic markers is comparable. Quantitative seismic quality analysis results indicate comparable results with reprocessed legacy data except for the frequency bandwidth. This indicates that modern processing techniques improve the quality of legacy 2D data to the level of advanced newly acquired data suitable for regional structural interpretation objectives in areas of shallow-water depth and shallow basement. This understanding may be useful when undertaking regional evaluations and deciding between seismic acquisition or reprocessing.