Articles
Introduction to September Focus: Overseas Research
Rob Holt
Although the winds of change can rapidly derail the best laid plans in our price-sensitive industry, academia, with its longer-term outlook and lack of shareholders has traditionally and necessarily provided a safe haven for the nurturing of young geophysical talent and new concepts which will shape the direction of future…
The School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol
Michael Kendall
The School of Earth Sciences is situated at the historic heart of the University of Bristol campus, in the neo-Gothic Wills Memorial Building. The School is one of the top 3 Earth Science research organisations in the UK (e.g., REF2014) and is currently ranked 15th in the world (QS World…
Geophysics Programs at the Department of Exploration Geophysics at Curtin University, Perth, Australia
Boris Gurevich, Andrej Bona, Roman Pevzner, Milovan Urosevic, and Rob Ross
Curtin University is centrally located in Perth at the heart of Australia’s premier energy and mining state of Western Australia. The Department of Exploration Geophysics, part of the Curtin WA School of Mines (WASM) at Curtin University, provides a comprehensive range of internationally recognised specialist geophysics degree level courses ranging…
Seismic shale characterization research at the Edinburgh Anisotropy Project
Mark Chapman, Xiaoyang Wu, Li Yang, Keran Qian, Heng-Chang Dai and Xiang-Yang Li
The Edinburgh Anisotropy Project is a long running industry-academic research consortium working on all aspects of seismic anisotropy, with a particular emphasis on anisotropic rock physics, fracture detection and converted-wave seismic methods. In recent years EAP has increasingly addressed problems arising in seismic shale characterization. The ultimate goal of this…
Exploration geophysics at the University of Houston: The shale trail and other unconventional voyage
Robert R. Stewart, Fabiola Ruiz, Julia Wellner, Nikolay Dyaur, and Long Huang
Understanding the subsurface and finding something valuable in it are the key roles of an exploration geophysicist. It’s an exciting search and one that is continually improving. Many energy companies, contractors, government labs, and universities are active in the research and development efforts that give rise to these advancements.
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Seismic Research in Imaging Unconventional Reservoirs
Bob A. Hardage
The Exploration Geophysics Laboratory (EGL) is an industry-funded consortium positioned inside the Bureau of Economic Geology, a major structural component of the Jackson School of Geosciences at The University of Texas at Austin. The research focus of EGL is to develop and apply multicomponent seismic technology that will assist the…
Tributes to Professor Tad Ulrych
On August 19, 2014, we learned of the passing of a great Canadian geophysicist, Professor Tad Ulrych. Tad had an illustrious and successful career at the University of British Columbia for more than four decades. He was a wonderful mentor, teacher and research scientist. In 2014, Tad received the CSEG…
Full-Waveform Inversion: Challenges, Opportunities and Impact
Dimitri Bevc
There has been a great deal of industry activity and interest in full-waveform inversion (FWI) because of its potential to generate accurate high-resolution velocity models. Theoretically, the method has great promise, and compute power seems to be adequate to bring this promise to bear on practical business problems. The promise…
Introduction to June Focus: Unconventional Resources
Marco Perez
Within the unconventional era of hydrocarbon exploitation, a geophysicist is asked the “question” of how to high-grade drilling locations for optimal and efficient reservoir development. He, or she, is asked to interpret subtle changes in elastic property estimated from surface measurements, on rock thousands of meters beneath the earth’s surface.…
Interpreting AVOAz using limaçons
Benjamin Roure
Limaçon is a French word meaning snail (from the Latin word limax). In the real world, limaçons have a wide range of applications from culinary (a delicacy in some countries) to cosmetics (their slime is used for human skincare). In the mathematical world, limaçons (also known as Pascal’s limaçons after…
Short note: Estimation of anisotropic minimum horizontal closure stress
Bill Goodway
In the past seismic imaging and AVO were driven by isotropic models of the Earth. More recently the use of quantitative interpretation attributes to characterize unconventional reservoirs has continued within this isotropic assumption. However, at the 2013 SEG convention, Leon Thomsen argued that industry has been doing AVO wrong for…
Shear wave anisotropy estimates via azimuthal amplitude-variation-with-offset inversion
David Cho, David Miller, Mark Norton, Ayon Kumar Dey and Frederick Kierulf
Traveltime and amplitude based techniques to detect seismic anisotropy have inherent differences in their assumptions and the underlying physics used to describe the seismic response. For this reason, they often produce conflicting solutions, which can lead to inconsistencies between the results. Traveltime methods estimate an interval property, providing an easy…
Airborne Electromagnetic Systems – State of the Art and Future Directions
Jean M. Legault
Airborne electromagnetics (AEM) is easily one of the most popular geophysical methods used in mineral exploration around the world and is possibly second to only aeromagnetics-radiometrics as being the most widely deployed. AEM was initially developed after the Second World War to explore for mineral deposits (Fountain, 1998), and since…
From Recommender Systems to 5D Seismic Data Reconstruction
Mauricio D. Sacchi
In recent years, the development of recommendation systems has become an important area of research for data scientists. A recommendation system (or recommender system) is an algorithm that attempts to predict the rating that a user or costumer will give to an item. Recommendation systems have become quite popular in…
Introduction to May Focus: Rock Physics
Douglas R. Schmitt
Practitioners of Rock Physics can sometimes become quite Emo when a bunch of Punks call us Geeks because we Breakcore and Grindcore. But, if you need to make a piece of Experimental Rock, particularly if it is from a Hard-core, you sometimes have to Thrash it in your Garage. Okay,…
Resistivity and density estimation from multicomponent seismic data: case study from the lower cretaceous McMurray formation, Athabasca Oil Sands
Fred Mayer, Carmen C. Dumitrescu, Glenn Larson
We present a case study of oil sands reservoir characterization using resistivity and density seismic volumes estimated from multicomponent seismic data. In the Athabasca Oil Sands region of Alberta, the Lower Cretaceous McMurray Formation is the reservoir. In this reservoir the sand can be differentiated from shale based on density.…
Empirical relations between ultrasonic P-wave velocity, porosity and uniaxial compressive strength
Xiwei Chen, Douglas R. Schmitt, James A. Kessler, James Evans, Randy Kofman
The uniaxial compressive strength (UCS) is one of the most important geotechnical properties of rock and it has been widely used in geological and geo-mechanical engineering projects. In this study, UCS and other basic physical properties of 165 basalt samples at 55 different depths along zone of interest (ZOI) from…
Study of elastic anisotropy on an unconventional ‘shale’ rock using ultrasonic waves and static strain measurements
O.N. Ong, J. Meléndez-Martínez, D.R. Schmitt, and R. Kofman
Elastic anisotropy is a seismic attribute defined as the variation of wave speed as a function of its propagation direction within a medium. With the increase in interest of unconventional reservoirs, the incorporation of anisotropic factors is a necessity to provide more accurate seismological models. Without consideration of anisotropic effects,…
Survey Responses on the Public Perception of Induced Seismicity
Neda Boroumand
A survey was issued by the Canadian Society of Exploration Geophysicists (CSEG) to gauge the public’s perception of induced seismicity (IS) in the summer of 2014. It revealed that education efforts on IS should be collaborative involving industry, academia and regulators, but documents issuing from this work must crucially be…
2014 CSEG Awards
2014 CSEG Award Winners.
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