Articles
Forensic Data Processing – Revealing Your Data’s Hidden Stories
Joe Dellinger
We are asking for more and more from our seismic data: more efficient acquisition, broader bandwidth (both high and low), sources that are more environmentally friendly (i.e. quieter), accurate amplitudes for AVO and 4D. Acquisition and processing are undergoing a revolution to support these needs. New developments such as simultaneous…
Introduction To March Focus: GeoConvention Preview
Rob Holt
The late, great Tom Podivinsky said "for generating prospects, fundamentally we look at whatever everyone else is doing and then copy them" in his RECORDER interview (January, 2014). Let us also not forget that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I always look forward to attending the GeoConvention. It…
Finding Sweet-Spots and Quantifying Recovery Potential in Unconventional Plays:
Using the Montney Play as an example of how a Common Risk Segment Mapping approach can be applied to quantifying Estimated Ultimate Recovery in pervasive hydrocarbon systems
Ian J. Cockerill and Aaron W. Hughes
hen liquids-rich parts of the Montney Play in northeast British Columbia (NEBC) emerged and began to be developed in late 2013 and 2014, ‘The Montney’ was thrust on to the scene as one of the most commercially attractive and compelling unconventional prospects in North America. A rush to find where…
Microseismic Geomechanics Interpretation of a Montney Hydraulic Fracture
Drew Chorney, Mike Smith and Shawn Maxwell
In this paper, we describe the use of a geomechanical model to interpret microseismicity recorded during a Montney hydraulic fracture treatment. The microseismic geomechanical model is calibrated to the recorded microseismicity and used to understand the complete fracture network, including the proppant distribution. The calibrated model is then used to…
Supercomputing Needs of our Industry
Satinder Chopra and Kurt J. Marfurt
The search for oil and gas has now moved into complex frontier areas such as the foothills in the onshore and into deeper waters and subsalt traps in the offshore, where geological risks are higher. The need to maximize the economic production of hydrocarbons in our current low price environment…
Reducing Uncertainty in Characterization of Vaca Muerta Fm Shale with Post-stack Seismic Data
Ritesh Kumar Sharma, Satinder Chopra, Luis Vernengo, Eduardo Trinchero and Claudio Sylwan
The Late Jurassic-Early Cretaceous Vaca Muerta (VM) Formation in the Neuquén Basin has served as an important source rock for many of the conventional oil and gas fields in Argentina. With the interest in developing and exploiting the shale resources in the country, many companies there have undertaken the characterization…
Preconditioning of Seismic Data Prior to Impedance Inversion
Satinder Chopra and Ritesh Kumar Sharma
The calibration of seismic data with the available well control is an important step that provides the link between seismic reflections, their stratigraphic interpretation and subsequent prediction of reservoir and fluid properties. The standard practice to do this has been to produce synthetic seismograms from well logs with a bandwidth…
The Oil Price and Seismic Exploration: A Roller Coaster Ride
Easton Wren
In any debate a historical perspective is useful since it tells us where we were and how we got here. It does not necessarily enable predicting the future. The ever changing oil price and the ups and downs of seismic exploration are ideal examples for looking into the past and…
Introduction To February Focus: Reservoir Geophysics
Marco Perez
Geophysics has a wide range of uses within the oil and gas industry. In the broadest sense, geophysical data is a representation of the earth’s interior. Geophysicists design experiments to ascertain properties such as structure, geomorphology and even mapping hydrocarbon reservoirs. Reservoir geophysics can mean a number of different things…
A Reservoir Characterization Strategy for the Flemish Pass Basin, Offshore Newfoundland and Labrador
Chris Blackwood and Gary Thorpe
In frontier deep water exploration settings such as the Flemish Pass offshore Newfoundland and Labrador, wells are uncommon and are often separated by tens of kilometres or more. Given the scarcity of well data, well-to-seismic calibrations must be extrapolated over large distances. Seismic interpretation and analysis drives the understanding of…
Predicting Mineralogy from Elastic Rock Properties
Rob Holt and Bill Westwood
In contrast to conventional reservoirs, where the measured elastic rock properties are sensitive to changes in facies, porosity and pore fluids, we find that changes in the elastic rock properties of low porosity unconventional plays are driven largely by changes in the relative fractions of the dominant minerals that form…
An Overview of Microseismic Acquisition Project Management
Jubran Akram and Atila da Silva Paes
In the past decade, the boom of stimulation and production from the unconventional reservoirs have made microseismic monitoring a commonly used technology in the petroleum industry. However, the recent business challenges faced by the petroleum industry have amplified the need for cost optimization while achieving the maximum benefits from a…
Inversion in Depth?
Satinder Chopra
An interesting idea that was highlighted at the recently concluded 2015 SEG Convention at New Orleans was about carrying out seismic impedance inversion in the depth domain. ‘Inversion’ refers to the transformation of seismic amplitude data into acoustic impedance data. Seismic data represent an interface property wherein reflection events are…
Value Thinking from the Classical to the Hyper-Modern
Lee Hunt
The modern geoscientist has access to an unrivaled depth of geoscientific knowledge. There seems to be a technique for everything, and an available level of detail to fit any issue. More articles, more ideas, more complex formulae, more everything. Famed geoscientists argue certain technical minutiae the way old theists would…
Introduction To January Focus: Geoscience Innovations – Best of GeoConvention 2015
Rob McGrory
Our joint annual convention has been the principal technical conference for Canadian earth scientists principally working in the petroleum industry. The purpose is to communicate, and stay informed about the latest developments in our profession, and network with fellow professionals. The three societies involved in GeoConvention are the Canadian Well…
Gravity Monitoring of 4D Fluid Migration in SAGD Reservoirs – Forward Modelling
E. Judith Elliott and Alexander Braun
The feasibility of time-lapse gravity and gravity gradient monitoring for Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) Reservoirs is investigated. Two major obstacles have prevented the use of time-lapse gravimetry on small scale reservoirs, namely i) the need for sub-μGal sensitivity, and ii) the high noise levels in the vicinity of the…
Using the Scattering Transform to Predict Stratigraphic Units from Well Logs
Ben Bougher and Felix J. Herrmann
Applications of machine learning (ML) have become ubiquitous across many domains in both academia and industry. Voice and facial recognition are now robust features in smart phones and cameras, while text learning and behaviour tracking on the internet have created a commodity market for data. Self-driving cars and spatially aware…
Reading Between the Lines II: A NEBC Shale Gas Quantitative Interpretation Case Study Incorporating Multi-Component Data
Laurie Weston Bellman, Jennifer Leslie-Panek, Pamela Reid and Eric von Lunen
The objective of this case study (Weston Bellman et al., 2015a) was to enhance and improve the prediction of facies and geomechanical properties of a shale reservoir interval. The conditioning, analysis and blending of the converted-wave (PS) data into the more conventional quantitative interpretation (QI) will be described to illustrate…
Cost-Effective Seismic Exclusion Zone Mitigation Using Optimal Station Prediction (OSP) Method
Andrea Crook
For large seismic exclusion zones affecting numerous source and/or receiver stations, should all the stations within the exclusion be skidded or offset around the edges of the exclusion, or should select stations that provide the most geophysical and economic value be used instead? How do we quantify station value? Is…
Working Visually with the Wavefield
Dr. Steven Lynch
Seismic begins life as an analog acoustic wavefield. We record it digitally and we process it digitally but it is, in its natural state, continuous in both time and space. Despite the venerable familiarity of conventional seismic displays, seismic does not naturally segregate into individual (wiggle) traces and it does…
