320 THE LEADING EDGE March 2015 W ORKSHOP R EVIEW Report on the SEG/KOC joint workshop in Kuwait: Seismic multiples — Are they signal or noise? I n December 2014, SEG and Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) held a joint workshop in Kuwait City to advance the under- standing of seismic multiples and to provide answers to the question posed in the title of the workshop, “Seismic multiples — Are they signal or noise?” Indeed, despite recent advances in the prediction of multiples as noise and in their imaging as sig- nal, the processing of multiples in seismic data remains a major challenge for the industry. e main goals of the workshop were stated as understand- ing of new concepts, assessing their effectiveness against the challenges faced in industrial applications, and charting ways for future developments. e technical scope of the workshop was broadly defined, calling for research as well as case-study papers, with data examples from marine and onshore surveys, while retaining a strong emphasis on the relevance of technolo- gies to Middle Eastern hydrocarbon oil fields. e workshop in Kuwait overlapped with some of the themes discussed at the joint SEG/EAGE forum in the fall of 2013, “Turning noise into geologic information: e next big step?,” and with the 2014 SEG postconvention workshop “Using multiples as signal for imaging.” ose two recent workshops provided a wealth of information on new developments, mainly in research, related to multiples and other events in the data tra- ditionally considered as noise. However, the workshop in Ku- wait differed from the previous ones in its attention to industrial applications of current and emerging technologies, particularly in the Middle East. e Kuwait workshop agenda had six half-day sessions, each including one keynote and one invited presentation as well as two to four technical presentations, all in the standard format Adel El-Emam 1 , Clement Kostov 2 , and Mohamed T. Hadidi 3 of a 20-minute oral presentation plus five minutes for questions. e talks in each session were followed by a discussion session led by a moderator, in which the audience could address more detailed questions to the presenters and could raise additional questions related to the topic of the session. About 70 people participated in the workshop. e group of participants was diverse in terms of geographic regions (Middle East, Europe, United States, and Asia), institutions (eight oil companies, five contractors, four universities, and two consul- tants), and professional background and experience (acquisition, processing, and research). e total number of papers presented was 28, including 12 keynote and invited presentations. Below, we present a summary of key points from each work- shop session and conclude with lessons learned, particularly with respect to potential industrial applications of new technologies. Research on multiples as noise e keynote presentation by Yi Luo contrasted current suc- cesses of data-driven multiple-attenuation methods, typically when the multiple-generating horizons produce strong, inter- pretable seismic reflections (e.g., free-surface multiples for ma- rine data), with the lack of methods to identify and attenuate internal multiples generated by reflections from thin-bed se- quences, such as is common in the Middle East. e presentation by Bill Dragoset (via prerecorded video) elaborated further on the challenges of data-driven methods for free surface and for internal multiples, pointing out key dif- ferences between “practical” and “ideal” conditions for applica- tions of those methods. In complex geologies such as in Kuwait, where primaries and multiples are similar to each other, current 1 Kuwait Oil Company (KOC). 2 Schlumberger. 3 Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Oil Operations (ADCO). SEG/KOC workshop technical committee (from left) Riyadh S. Al-Saad, Saudi Aramco; Mohammed Al-Ajmi (cochair), KOC; Ahmad Eidan (chair), KOC; Adel El-Emam, KOC; James Shorter, PDO; Mohamed T. Hadidi, ADCO; Clement Kostov, Schlumberger; Matthieu Retailleau, CGG. Session chair James Rickett of Schlumberger (left) presents a token of appreciation to keynote speaker Eric Verschuur of Delft University of Technology.