Special Section — Marine Controlled-source Electromagnetic Methods an Introduction to Marine Controlled-source Electromagnetic Methods for Hydrocarbon Exploration

Early development of marine electromagnetic methods, dating back about 80 years, was driven largely by defense/military applications, and use for these purposes continues to this day. Deepwater, frequency-domain, electric dipole-dipole, controlled-source electromagnetic CSEM methods arose from academic studies of the oceanic lithosphere in the 1980s, and although the hydrocarbon exploration industry was aware of this work, the shallow-water environments being explored at that time were not ideally suited for its use. Low oil prices and increasingly successful results from 3D seismic methods further discouraged investment in costly alternative geophysical data streams. These circumstances changed in the late 1990s, when both Statoil and ExxonMobil began modeling studies and field