Articles
How Did M&A’s Impact R&D in Geophysics
Gordon Cope
Long before the slowdown of the Asian economy in early 1998 triggered the collapse of crude oil, petroleum companies around the world had been altering the way that they dealt with research and development. In this third in a series of articles, The RECORDER examines the impact of the latest…
International Negotiations
David Mitrovica
... Refraction Tomography: A Practical Overview of Emerging Technologies
Konstantin Osypov
Near-surface velocity anomalies produce severe distortions in seismic images. If one knew the detailed structure of these anomalies, the best way to tackle this problem would be to perform wave-equation datuming or depth migration from the surface. However, 3-D prestack depth imaging and datuming are computational challenges and highly sensitive…
Non-Hyperbolic Moveout, Polar Anisotropy and Anelasticity
Arnim B. Haase
Experience with anisotropic velocity analysis shows that, occasionally, non-hyperbolic moveout in plains data cannot be satisfactorily corrected with the Grechka/Tsvankin approximation as presented at the 1997 SEG convention (Grechka and Tsvankin, 1997). For this approximation, a Taylor-series expansion is truncated beyond the fourth power in offset. In a subsequently published…
Revisiting the Radial Trace Transform
David C. Henley
In geophysics, as with many other disciplines, it can sometimes be fruitful to review an idea originally conceived many years ago for one particular application, to see whether it can also be used for other purposes. The radial trace transform is an example of such an idea. Originally introduced by…
M&A’s and the Service Industry
Gordon Cope
In early 1998, the collapse of the Asian economy left the world awash in surplus oil. Within months, the price of crude dipped to record lows of $11 per barrel. Petroleum companies scrambled to cut costs, and exploration and production expenditures were the first to be curtailed. In Canada alone,…
Expatriate Recruitment and Effectiveness
David Mitrovica
A dominant theme during the last decade has been, and continues to be, the issue of globalisation. Globalisation encapsulates a description of a rapid, and pervasive, diffusion around the world of production, consumption, investment and trade flows in goods, services, capital and technology.
... Seismic Inversion – The Best Tool for Reservoir Characterization
John Pendrel
The principle objective of seismic inversion is to transform seismic reflection data into a quantitative rock property, descriptive of the reservoir. In its most simple form, acoustic impedance logs are computed at each CMP. In other words, if we had drilled and logged wells at the CMP’s, what would the…
Stochastic Seismic Inversion Applied to Reservoir Characterization
Gary Robinson
Seismic inversion has been used for several decades in the petroleum industry, both for exploration and production purposes. During this time, seismic inversion methods have progressed from the initial recursive inversion method to the present plethora of methods and software packages available to transform band-limited seismic traces to impedance traces.…
A Robust Joint Inversion Algorithm for Rock Property Estimation
Xin-Quan Ma
In the last decade or so, there has been increased interest in prestack inversion. This is because prestack inversion can extract not only compressive information but also estimates of shear information about a rock. The shear wave information is obtained from the variation of reflection coefficients with source-receiver spacing in…
The Effect of M&A’s on Geophysics
Gordon Cope
The office of geophysicist Matthew Candle* is a small cubicle filled with a desk, a telephone and three seismic monitors. Noticeably absent are family photos, diplomas and other personal effects. “I don’t want to have to carry out more than one box,” he simply states. Over the course of a…
Adding the Coherence Dimension to 3D Seismic Data
Satinder Chopra
If the mounting success story of any technology be adopted as a yardstick for its acceptance, three-dimensional (3D) seismic definitely asserts itself at the forefront of advances made in hydrocarbon exploration in the last 30 years. 3D seismic surveys are being carried out not only for exploration but development projects…
Leadership in Global Communications
David Mitrovica
Global managers - and the increasing number of Albertans working abroad - must be skilled communicators. Indeed, in a world with more than 37,000 transnational corporations and 207,000 foreign affiliates, cross-cultural communications is the most basic skill that global managers must cultivate. In my view, it is also the skill…
A Glimpse of 11,000-Year Old Inhabitants of Alberta
L.V. Hills, B. Kooyman, S. Tolman and P. McNeil
The St. Mary Dam, completed in 1950, recently required modification of its spillway. This resulted in lowering of water levels in the reservoir by about 10 metres. This allowed wind action to erode exposed late Pleistocene and Holocene sediments. Shayne Tolman visited the site with two of his sons, found…
Xogen – Tapwater as Fuel?
Stewart Trickett
I first heard about Xogen (pronounced “ex-o-jen”) Power Inc. of Calgary from a co-worker to whom I had been bragging about my stock market profits from a hydrogen fuel cell company. He referred me to Xogen’s web site at “www.xogen.com”. It begins credibly enough with a greetings from premier Ralph…
CSEG Scholarship Awards Program
Gordon Cope
For 30 years, the CSEG has been awarding scholarships to worthy geophysical students. From 1968 to 1999, a total of $610,862 has been disbursed to undergraduate and graduate students in universities and technical colleges across the country. This year, the committee awarded 17 scholarships of $1,500, a total of $25,500.…
Effect of Well Control on Constrained Sparse Spike Seismic Inversion
John Pendrel and Paul Van Riel
Modern seismic inversion methods transform seismic reflection data to pseudo acoustic impedance logs. Implicit in this approach is an integration of low frequency model information with higher frequencies from the seismic. This is necessary since the low frequencies present in logs and therefore required by the inversion, are absent in…
Odyssey of Oil
Oliver Kuhn
This article looks at how and where ancient humans found oil and gas, explores some examples of ancient oil industries in North America and the Middle East, and finally tells the story of a relatively unknown culture whose existence was inextricably intertwined with the economics and politics of an ancient…
Amplitude-vs-Offset and Seismic Rock Property Analysis: A Primer
Michael Burianyk
In this article, we’ll examine the basics of amplitude variations with offset (AVO) and rock properties derived from them. First we’ll look at the physical cause for AVO behavior. We’ll then discuss the quantitative methodologies for calculating attributes which describe the AVO behavior of pre-stack seismic data. At the same…
Eigen-Image Analysis as a Quality Control Tool to Improve Deconvolution
Xishuo Wang
Surface consistent deconvolutions have become increasingly more sophisticated and as a result onshore deconvolution can be seen as a mysterious black box process. Many of the available QC displays are difficult to interpret, mainly because it is hard to display the spatial distribution of frequency- variable effects, especially with 3D…
