S-Cube & ONGC Showcase Land and Marine TSL-FWI™ Breakthroughs at SEG Bengaluru

At the SEG Transforming Energy Exploration: Technology, Sustainability, and Innovation Symposium in Bengaluru, joint technical presentations from S-Cube and ONGC (GEOPIC) showcased the first published applications of Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) across both onshore and offshore settings in India, from the Bengal and Mahanadi basins.

Overcoming the Waveform Inversion Hurdle

Conventional trace-by-trace FWI often struggles with cycle skipping: mismatched recorded and synthetic seismic waveforms cause the inversion to fall into local minima, leading to severely distorted subsurface models.

To overcome this, S-Cube and ONGC deployed the Time-Space-Lag FWI (TSL-FWI™) algorithm. By using an adaptive matching mechanism across both space and time, TSL-FWI™ relaxes cyclical matching and bypasses temporal and spatial cycle skipping without requiring long offsets or low frequencies. This enables deep macro-velocity model updates starting from distant or highly inaccurate initial models.

Onshore Bengal Basin: Revitalizing a Legacy Dynamite Survey

Presented by Saheb Ghosh (ONGC-GEOPIC), the Bengal Basin case tackled severe deep imaging distortions below a thick carbonate layer in a legacy onshore dynamite survey. TSL-FWI™ corrected the deep structural distortions at depths below 6 km, reaching 4x deeper than the diving wave penetration limit.

The result demonstrates that TSL-FWI™ can extract deep structural clarity from older onshore data, significantly expanding target depth horizons without costly re-acquisition.

Offshore Mahanadi Basin: Prospects Defined from Scratch

In the deepwater Mahanadi Basin, the existing velocity model from a streamer survey lacked detail and failed to image key targets. TSL-FWI™ identified and resolved gas-charged Mio-Pliocene channel-levee complexes from scratch, providing a reliable framework for reservoir characterization in a complex depositional system.

ONGC's deepwater drilling campaign targeting this play commenced in July 2026. In September, ONGC reported gas from the first well, MN-DW18-1-H-D off Odisha, with encouraging flow and reservoir pressure.

Key Implications for Regional Exploration

• Revitalizing legacy datasets: deep structural clarity from older onshore dynamite data, expanding target depths without re-acquisition.
• Automated prospect identification: resolving channel-levee complexes directly from scratch in offshore settings such as the Mahanadi Basin.

Learn more in our Mahanadi Basin case study and the symposium programme.