Utilising permanently installed fibre optic cables, hydraulic fracture monitoring on shale gas wells was completed. Based on the intelligent Distributed Acoustic Sensor (iDAS™) and ULTIMA™ DTS, Silixa’s hydraulic fracture monitoring package provided real-time acoustic and temperature data to determine the effectiveness of the hydraulic fracturing process. The iDAS also recorded and identified the first microseismic content for acoustic data, measuring the frack propagation in real time, therefore ensuring reservoir integrity.

The wells will be revisited in 2016 to monitor the well for production profiling, and then over the entire lifetime of the wells, allowing for future production monitoring, seismic surveying and well integrity surveillance without further intervention.

Silixa successfully delivered the first 3D migrated iDAS seismic data from an offshore multi-well survey in the UK.

Silixa also installed the intelligent Pipeline Surveillance System (iPSS™) on a 55 km long crude export pipeline in Africa. The system provides a complete and uninterrupted pipeline coverage detecting and identifying breaches and external threats as well as providing real-time temperature based leak detection. Advantages of the iPSS system include the ability to monitor the integrity of pipelines with unparalleled sensitivity & positional accuracy on either newly installed fibre optic cable or dark fibres in pre-existing cables.