Now the industry is recovering from the down term, this may provide new opportunities in research directions. Within the Delphi Consortium, we consider the complete value chain and aim at the interaction between the different stages in the upstream E&P business. That is why we have Acquisition, Processing, Imaging and Reservoir Characterization (and beyond) in our research portfolio, as all these steps need be considered simultaneously in order to maximize the results.

Expectations are that the World’s total energy demand will keep growing, especially in the upcoming economies (see Figure 1a below) and that oil and gas will maintain a steady contribution to the total energy consumption in the next decades, although the renewables will get a larger share, of course (see Figure 1b below). Even in the scenario of a faster transition to low-carbon energy sources (Figure 2) we clearly see that the production of oil is expected to maintain more or less steady for the next two decades and the gas consumption is expected still to grow.

More than ever high-technology tools are needed to get a more accurate view on the potential of established reservoirs and to monitor the production processes in order to maximize recovery in an economic way.

The mission of the Delphi consortium is to give a significant contribution to the realization of these ambitions.

Encouraged by the success of John Claerbout's consortium at Stanford in the seventies, professor Berkhout decided in the early eighties to set up a seismic consortium at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). Particularly with the help of one of his students, Paul van Riel (co-founder of Jason Geosystems), he started in 1982 the so-called PRINCEPS-consortium. The objective was estimation of acoustic impedance from seismic data by constrained trace inversion. PRINCEPS started with 5 companies.

From the research in the PRINCEPS-consortium it became clear that the extraction of in-situ rock information beyond acoustic impedance would require analysis of pre-stack seismic data, preferably after removal of the down- and upward propagation effects. Therefore, it was decided to set up a second consortium in Delft that was aiming at distortion-free, angle-dependent input for PRINCEPS. Particularly with the help of Kees Wapenaar (who had just successfully completed his Ph.D. thesis), professor Berkhout founded in 1987 the so-called TRITON-consortium. The objective was target-oriented pre-stack migration, using data-driven multiple removal and true-amplitude redatuming as preprocessing steps. TRITON started with 13 companies.

From the inversion research in PRINCEPS and the migration research in TRITON it became readily clear that both consortia would significantly benefit from a closer interaction. In 1989 it was decided to merge PRINCEPS and TRITON into one consortium: Delphi. The objective of Delphi was an integrated approach to multiple removal, velocty-independent migration and reservoir characterization. Delphi started with 21 companies.

From the integrated research in Delphi it emerged that the success of seismic imaging is largely determined by the way data acquisition is carried out. This particularly applies to the geometrical distribution of the sources and the detectors. Therefore, it was decided to start a third initiative aiming for an acquisition consortium that would investigate the influence of source and detector geometries on the quality of imaging and characterization results. Particularly with the help of Dr. Leo Ongkiehong (a former colleague of professor Berkhout in Shell), the so-called DOLPHIN-consortium was founded in 1995. The objective was to introduce a new approach to the analysis of acquisition geometries by making use of the focal beam concept. An important tool in DOLPHIN was, and still is, the downward- scaled acquisition system that has been built with the group's knowledge on medical imaging instrumentation. DOLPHIN started with 6 companies.

With the help of Dr. Gerrit Blacquière and Dr. Eric Verschuur (who both had successfully completed their Ph.D. thesis), DOLPHIN was fully integrated into the Delphi program as the Acquisition & Preprocessing (A&P) Project. In 2003, Delphi was further strengthened by adding the Reservoir Characterization & Monitoring (C&M) Project in order to make a better connection to the geologists and reservoir engineers.