Seafloor Electromagnetic Methods Consortium | Commerical Availability

It was envisaged from the start of the SEMC that SIO should assist in the development of a viable commercial capability for marine EM. SIO worked intially with AOA Geophysics and industry sponsors to ensure that equipment would be available, field crews trained, and software tools developed to allow proprietary surveys to be carried out by our sponsor companies, staring as early as 1995 with the first marine MT survey in the Mediterranean and followed soon after by other MT surveys in the Gulf of Mexico and North Atlantic. SIO personnel and equipment were an important part of the first CSEM surveys carried out by Statoil and ExxonMobil in 2000-2002.

But times have changed! AOA Geophysics no longer offers marine EM field surveys, but several other companies do (emgs, OHM Surveys, and WestenGeco). The SEMC continues to work with all of these companies, and many others, to support the future development of marine EM methods for exploration. It should be noted, however, that some of the early SIO intellectual property was exclusively licensed to AOA/AGO, now part of WesternGeco. While SIO has reserved the right to use these technologies for research purposes, clearly this limits SIO's ability to provide these particular technologies to other companies for commercial use.