ION Geophysical Corporation has announced that its imaging services supported the historic Zama-1 discovery offshore Mexico made by Talos Energy, LLC (Talos) and its partners. Zama-1 is the first offshore exploration well drilled by the private sector in Mexico’s history and is estimated to hold 1.4 to 2.0 billion barrels of oil in place.

ION closely collaborated with Talos to reprocess and reimage data over all their blocks offshore Mexico. The Gulf of Mexico is one of the most complex oil and gas provinces and requires advanced techniques to truly understand the challenging subsurface. The combination of ION’s extensive imaging experience in the Gulf of Mexico and proprietary processing technologies cost-effectively maximised data quality, delivering high resolution images that improved and de-risked prospect identification for the consortium.

John Parker, Executive Vice President of Exploration, Talos, comments, “The successful evaluation of the Zama prospect is a result of the tremendous collaboration between Talos, our consortium partners, Sierra Oil and Gas S. de R.L de C.V. and Premier Oil Plc, and ION. Talos launched this proprietary reprocessing project in March 2016, confident that ION could achieve significant improvement in imaging compared to the original data. ION’s proprietary reprocessing of seismic data over Blocks 2 and 7 delivered significant uplift with superior images of multiple prospects, including Zama. ION completed the project on time and on budget. The Zama-1 results make a number of these additional prospects, both shallow and deep, look very attractive.”

“As the first exploration well and discovery drilled by the private sector in Mexico in 79 years, Zama-1 is both a historic and significant discovery for Mexico and our clients. We are honored to have played a role in their journey to success,” says Ken Williamson, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of ION’s E&P Technology and Services group. “Tight collaboration with the consortium, almost 10 years of experience imaging the basin, and the application of the right technologies were key to accomplishing the consortium’s imaging objectives. ION continues advancing its processing capabilities to gain significantly greater value from seismic data to reduce the risk and cost of exploration and enable new discoveries.”

Tags: ION Geophysical Corporation, Talos Energy LLC