The Mission-Oriented Seismic Research Program (M-OSRP) is a research program and petroleum industry consortium, started in January 2001, at the University of Houston, to address seismic exploration and production problems whose solutions would have the most significant positive impact on our ability to locate and produce hydrocarbons.

The M-OSRP program is centered and administrated in the department of Physics. Its research and educational activity and support of graduate students span several departments including the departments of Physics and Geosciences.

A pressing challenge in petroleum seismology is the inability to locate and define hydrocarbon targets beneath complex media, e.g., salt, basalt, and karsted sediment. M-OSRP is pioneering and developing a direct response to this challenge. Objectives include the removal of free surface and internal multiples and depth imaging and inverting primaries, without the traditional need for subsurface information above the target, including a velocity model.

Several important projects provide the practical prerequisites that allow these new concepts and algorithms to reach their potential, e.g. the source wavelet, deghosting and data reconstruction. The program’s educational aim is the training and mentoring of future scientific and technical leaders.

M-OSRP has a portfolio of projects with short, medium, and longer term milestones and deliverables. The program produces reports and well-documented research prototype code. There is significant cooperative/ collaboration/ communication and interaction between M-OSRP and its petroleum industry sponsors; and, our eight world-class seismic expert adjunct professors, from our sponsor companies, play an important role in mentoring and guiding our graduate students.

In summary: The first and critical step is to identify and solve the right problem; that is, problems that explorationists define as serious impediments to current seismic capability. In our history, we developed the most effective and comprehensive set of algorithms for removing multiples and, able to accommodate complex heterogeneous ill-defined media, while requiring absolutely no subsurface information, whatsoever. Our current goal is to bring that same level of effectiveness to the processing of primaries. Hence, a central objective is accurate depth imaging and inverting primaries beneath a complex overburden without knowing or determining any property of the medium above the target. M-OSRP represents and provides a fundamentally new and effective response to the pressing challenges of exploration seismology.