Articles
International Exploration and Expatriate Recruitment and Effectiveness: The Overseas Assignment
David Mitrovica
A dominant theme of the 1990's has been and continues to be the issue of globalization. Globalization 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. Globalization has yielded such crucial worldwide trends as…
The Other Side of Fold
J. Bouska
Traditional notions of stack fold can lead us astray in 3-D seismic design. The consequence of fold variation appears to be more complicated than a simple relationship for signal to noise based solely on the square root of the number of traces in a common midpoint gather. This is particularly…
International Exploration and Expatriate Recruitment and Effectiveness: The Overseas Assignment
Gary F. Margrave, Robert J. Ferguson, and Alana R. Schoepp
A nonstationary generalization of the convolution integral is presented. Called nonstationary convolution, it forms the scaled superposition of impulse responses, whose form can vary arbitrarily with time or position, 'and has stationary convolution as a limiting form. An alternate formulation is also given, which has the same limiting form but…
Reservoir Quality Mapping with Geostatistical and Neural Network Techniques
Rainer Tonn and Jonathan Downton
This case study shows techniques to map quantitatively a Triassic Halfway reservoir in NE British Columbia, Canada. The sand is at a depth of roughly 1000 meters and has a reservoir thickness that is within the seismic tuning thickness. It demonstrates how significant seismic attributes can be extracted from 20…
Regional interpretation of steep faults in the Alberta Basin from public-domain gravity and magnetic data: an update
Darran J. Edwards, Henry V. Lyatsky and R. James Broten
The capability of providing regional information cheaply on the structure of sedimentary basins makes gravity and magnetic maps, in conjunction with seismic and geological information, potentially powerful tools in hydrocarbon exploration. In the Phanerozoic rocks of the Alberta Basin, significant magnetization is rare, and most magnetic anomalies are sourced in…
History Revisited – Atlantic No.3, 1948
Aubrey Kerr
The tumultuous chain of events on this freehold quarter, just one mile east of Imperial Leduc's 1947 discovery, commenced in the summer of 1947 with Frank McMahon breaking Imperial Oil's lease (signed in September 1946; bonus: 5 cents/acre). With the help of "Bus" Lacey, he top-leased, paying the Rebus family…
Seismic Anisotropy: From Constipation to Exploration Effectiveness
Dr. Leon Thomsen
Conventional isotropic seismology has been the most spectacularly successful technology in the history of oil exploration. In recent years, its extension to 3D application, recognizing the inherent 3D nature of our world, has significantly enhanced our exploration. In recent years, its extension to 3D application, recognizing the inherent 3D nature…
Integrated Technology Streamlines Amoco Exploitation Project
Darcy B. Cuthill, William P. Beaudoin, Werner Froehlich
A multidisciplinary asset team 1 with Amoco Canada's Oil Business Unit recently improved the quality of an exploitation program in a small oil field in Western Saskatchewan. The two month study utilized an integrated suite of Landmark applications for geology, geophysics, petrophysics, and reservoir engineering in a common work environment…
The Significance of the West Stoddart Doig Oil Discovery, Northeastern British Columbia
Doug Pruden and Peter Guyan
The newly discovered West Stoddart Field represents one of the largest Doig oil reservoirs in all of northeastern British Columbia, comprising at least four pools containing 50 million bbls of oil (7.95e6m3) and 8 Bd of gas (0.23e9m3). From the time that Remington Energy rig released the 16-32-87-21W6 discovery well…
Optimizing the Value of Your Seismic Program
Patrick Walsh
Oil & Gas firms face the constant challenge of improving their success rate while lowering the cost and time required to achieve those successes. A significant influence on a firm's ability to achieve competitive advantage and success is the use of digital data within their processes.
... Conversion to Inversion
Oz Yilmaz
The old way of seismic data analysis involves processing, imaging and interpretation – all in the time domain, conducted sequentially. This sequence is then followed by time-to-depth conversion.
... AVO Attribute Analysis on a Class I Clastic Reservoir
Jon Downton
This paper examines the usefulness of cross-plotting, as a visualization tool, in helping to understand the relationships between different AVO stacks and the presence of hydrocarbons. In particular, this paper will examine a methodology to identify Class I AVO anomalies using the family of AVO stacks based on Smith &…
Improved AVO fluid detection and lithology discrimination using Lamé petrophysical parameters: "λp", "µp", and "λ/µ fluid stack": from P and S inversions
B. Goodway, T. Chen and J. Downton
Traditional AVO and petrophysical analysis extract and exploit anomalous variations between seismic compressional wave velocity (Vp) and shear wave velocity (Vs) to indicate changes primarily in pore fluid, as well as lithologic properties (Gassmann 1951, Pickett 1963, Tatham 1982, Castagna 1993a). Other analysis methods using seismic measurements derive Poisson's ratio…
Sparse 3D, what’s in a name?
Jack Bouska
Recent technical innovation associated with sparse 3D design has resulted in acquisition costs that are substantially lower than both traditional 3D and comparable 2D seismic acquisition expenditures. The Sparse 3D cost/sq. km. price breakthrough has allowed Amoco Canada to pursue Devonian play trends into operationally difficult, heliportable, foothills terrain by…
Deep Sea Gas Hydrates: The Energy of the Future? Deep Sea Studies off Vancouver Island
Roy D. Hyndman
New clean energy sources and global climate change are subjects of much recent discussion. Naturally occurring gas hydrates containing methane may play an important role in both subjects. Hydrates are solid ice-like substances consisting of rigid water molecule cages stabilized by enclosed gas molecules, notably those of hydrocarbons. Gas hydrate…
Transmission filtering by high-amplitude reflection coefficients: Theory, practice, and processing c
Craig A. Coulombe and D. Neil Bird
Over the past few years, Chevron Canada Resources has had an intense and successful exploration effort in the Simonette area of west central Alberta (Figure 1). During our investigations, it was noticed that seismic data in the Devonian section are severely lacking in frequencies above 50 Hz even though the…
Methodology for Seismic Inversion, A Western Canadian Reef Example
John V. Pendrel and Paul Van Riel
Modern seismic inversion methods model both wavelet amplitude and phase effects and offer the opportunity for improved resolution and presentation of data in a form immediately recognizable to both geophysicists and geologists. This has re-focused our attention to the problem of non-uniqueness. Since the bandwidth of the seismic data is…
Discussion Forum
The CSEG Recorder Committee is always looking for and accepting feedback in any form regarding the content of the Recorder. The Recorder is the society's monthly publication, and as such welcomes your comments. The following was submitted from Peter Hubral and Thilo Müller from The Geophysical Institute, Karlsruhe University, Hertzstr.…
Integrating Geology, 3-D Seismic, and Production Data to Optimize Old Oil Pools in the Lower Cretaceous Glauconite Formation, Southern Alberta
Lisa Griffith, Tina Chow, Marc Houle and Brian Zaitlin
Countess O and F Pools (T.18, R.15,16w4) are part of a 535 km long Glauconitic compound incised valley system. Between Countess and Alderson, a 90 km reach of this trend has produced more than 100 Mmbbls oil and 300 Bcf gas from 122 pools. Although in its twilight years of…
Multivariate Geostatistics
Brian Russell and Dan Hampson
Multivariate geostatistics is a broad term that encompasses all geostatistical methods that utilize more than one variable to predict some physical property of the earth. Bivariate geostatistics is obviously the simplest subset of the multivariate techniques and thus the standard technique of cokriging could be called multivariate geostatistics. However, in…
