Besides the usual EAGE News and latest industry news, First Break February starts off with two Technical Articles on Comparison of lithology and net pay uncertainty between deterministic and geostatistical inversion workflows and Tutorial: Velocity estimation via ray-based tomography . This month's First Break has two Special Topics: Land Seismic and Middle East.

Since it began in 2006, EAGE’s office in Dubai has been successful in distributing geoscience knowledge to its growing membership in the Middle East. It enjoys the support of the national and international oil companies, academia, local societies in the region, and has developed good relations with its members.

EAGE and SPE recently formalized an agreement to work collaboratively for the benefit of their members on joint events, young member programmes, and other services. The societies will establish an EAGE/SPE Cooperation Committee to oversee the relationship, with initial plans to meet twice annually. They have also agreed to seek ways to collaborate on workshops and conferences for members, including at the Offshore Europe event.

Pre-qualifiers are beginning to announce themselves for the Greenland 2010 Baffin Bay licensing round. Faroe Petroleum and Noreco both say they are among the 13 pre-qualifying companies. The licensing round, for which applications are being sought by May 2010, covers the prospective north west area of Greenland and is north of the Disko area where licences were awarded to a number of companies including Cairn Energy, Chevron, and Exxon, in 2007.

CGGVeritas and Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS) have released the latest vessel utilization figures for their marine seismic fleets showing broadly stable operations but with fewer active vessels. Highlights for CGGVeritas in the fourth quarter of 2009 were strong multi- client sales both offshore Brazil and in the Gulf of Mexico. The company also believes from client feedback that an increase in E&P spending is ahead.

The book presents the various seismic imaging methods currently in use in the Oil and Gas industry in a unified and almost equation-free approach. Guided step by step through each method well illustrated by figures and examples, the reader will discover differences between time and depth imaging, how they impact the quality of the seismic image, the distinction between Kirchhoff, Gaussian Beam and other Beam techniques, principles of ray-based tomography and how it may be used after wave-equation methods, in what sense two-way Reverse Time Migration differs from one-way Shot Point migration, what are the emerging routes for migration velocity analysis, what can we expect from Full Waveform Inversion and at what cost, how 3D and wide azimuth acquisition impact imaging, and answers to many other questions.