BGP Brand Guidelines: A 1951 Seismic Start, Zhuozhou & the GeoEast Software Platform

A state survey bureau that kept its initials.

BGP traces its work back to 1951, when, the company says, it began seismic exploration in China. Its history page gives 1972 as the year it was formally named BGP — the Bureau of Geophysical Prospecting, by which time it had grown to 38 crews and built the first seismic data processing centre in China. The three initials of that bureau name are the brand used today, in English and on the company’s international pages, while the Chinese name on its website places it within the China National Petroleum Corporation group.

The company’s headquarters are in Zhuozhou, a city in Hebei province. BGP says its international operations opened in the 1990s. Its history page dates the first international seismic acquisition project, in Myanmar, to 1988, and says that in 1994 it took on subcontracted acquisition work in western China for international oil companies and won bids in Ecuador.

The modern company dates from 2002. That year, BGP says, it was formally established as a limited liability company after merging with six other geophysical divisions operating in different parts of China. Later entries on its history page record two further rounds in which it merged other geophysical units of CNPC into BGP, and the separation of its information technology division, Richfit, as an independent company under CNPC management.

BGP describes itself today as the geophysical subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corporation. English Wikipedia uses the same description in its account of BGP’s 2010 joint venture with the American firm ION Geophysical.

Crews, vessels and software platforms.

BGP presents itself through a long list of services rather than one flagship product. Its company page lists onshore, transition-zone and offshore seismic acquisition; seismic data processing; interpretation and reservoir geophysics; geophysical research; optical-fibre borehole services; non-seismic surveys such as gravity, magnetic and electromagnetic work; software; equipment manufacturing; multi-client data; and new energy business. It says it works in more than 80 countries and regions, and gives its current resources as 133 land seismic crews, 11 ocean-bottom cable and node crews, 4 streamer vessels, 11 borehole crews, 21 non-seismic crews and 28 processing and interpretation centres in China and overseas.

Two software names carry much of the brand. KLSeis is the company’s seismic acquisition software system, covering survey design, modelling, data quality control, vibroseis operation and statics. GeoEast, written with a registered mark on BGP’s pages, is its platform for processing and interpretation, which the company says runs from workstation to large processing-centre clusters.

Hardware has its own names. BGP lists the eSeis recording system, SD7 series geophones, the EV56 broadband vibrator and the uDAS fibre-optic sensing system, which its history page says was launched at the EAGE conference in London in 2019. The same page records the launch of the 12-streamer vessel BGP Prospector, the vessel BGP Explorer at Tanggu, and the BGP Innovator, which the company built for shallow-water ocean-bottom node work.

Partnerships matter too. BGP’s history says that at the SEG meeting in San Antonio in 2019 it launched the GPR ocean-bottom node jointly with Sercel. Offshore Energy reported on 2 September 2022 that Sercel had sold BGP a second batch of 12,000 GPR300 nodes, following an order of 18,000 in 2021, for a seabed project in the Middle East. BGP’s history page also lists its own HAWK autonomous nodal recorder and a second generation of the acquisition software, KLSeis II.

How survey firms present themselves.

Seismic and geophysical survey companies sell something most people never see: an image of rock layers far below the ground or the seabed. Their websites therefore lean on pictures of the work itself. Survey vessels towing long streamer cables, land crews laying out sensors across desert or farmland, and vibrator trucks lined up on a survey line are the photographs these companies publish again and again, usually next to a coloured cross-section of the subsurface.

Those seismic-image samples do much of the visual work. A processed section, with its bands of colour and folded layers, shows what the company delivers far more quickly than a paragraph of text could. Multi-client data libraries, where a company surveys an area once and licenses the data to several clients, are usually presented through interactive maps and region pages, described in the terms each company chooses for its own library.

Equipment makers and node operators follow a slightly different pattern. Ocean-bottom node pages, land nodal systems and streamer products tend to appear as clean product shots against white or dark backgrounds, with named product lines and launch dates. Land-crew and field-service pages add maps, location lists and training or support offers. Many of these firms also present newer work in mining, geothermal, carbon storage and infrastructure monitoring alongside oil and gas.

Because several of the companies are listed, investor pages are a large part of the picture: results, governance documents and regulated information, laid out in the plain, orderly style that stock exchanges expect. Names change often in this sector, through mergers, renames and asset sales, so a company’s history page and its newsroom are usually the clearest record of who it is today and what it used to be called.

Three initials, two names and a joint venture.

BGP’s documented tie with an American company came in land equipment. In March 2010, according to English Wikipedia, BGP and ION Geophysical launched INOVA Geophysical Equipment Limited, owned 51% by BGP and 49% by ION, to design and supply land seismic recording systems, energy sources and digital sensors. BGP’s history page records the signing ceremony in Beijing and later credits INOVA with a recording system called G3i, which it says could handle more than 100,000 channels in real time.

The company also runs a multi-client business, selling the same surveys to many explorers. BGP says its library includes seismic, magnetic, gravity and interpretation products in South America, Africa, Europe and Asia Pacific, and that it keeps three data rooms, in Tianjin, Houston and Reigate in England, where companies can view data examples. Its offshore branch, BGP Offshore, says it provides ocean-bottom node, ocean-bottom cable and 2D, 3D and 4D towed-streamer acquisition, and that it manages its own ship-management unit and fleet. It says its offshore work has covered more than 60 countries, from the US Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea to East and West Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, and that its management system is certified to ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 by DNV GL.

On its public pages, the company leans on crew records, vessel launches and conference stands at events such as EAGE and IMAGE, rather than on a consumer-style identity. The initials do most of the work: the same three letters label the vessels, the offshore branch and the company’s social media accounts.

For a design guide, BGP shows how a state bureau name can be reduced to initials and then extended across vessels, software and regional branches. Compare Sercel and ION Geophysical. For this guide we use delta teal, loess sand and basin red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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