Articles
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.
...
Introduction To April Focus: Land Seismic
Rob Vestrum
The papers in this section on Land Seismic were inspired by the Land Seismic Workshop in Banff, September 23 to 25, 2014. The workshop was jointly held by the CSEG and the EAGE, and the technical sessions included as much discussion time as presentation time. Our vision was to collect…
On the use of coincident shots and receivers in Megabin geometry and in orthogonal geometry
Gijs J. O. Vermeer
Recently two papers were published in the RECORDER that dealt with a comparison of Megabin geometry with orthogonal geometry in the context of 5D interpolation (Duncan et al., 2014; Harger and Schweigert, 2014). What struck me is the use of coincident shots and receivers in the Megabin geometries and also…
The advantages of applying cableless technology: A case study in Colombia
Hector A. Alfonso
The results and experiences from a 3D survey recently carried out by Ecopetrol and its partner Talisman, in the Llanos Basin of Colombia, are presented. More than 8000 channels patch on land were used for the first time in Colombia using cableless technology.
...
Seismic exploration in extreme topography: Acquisition for optimal imaging
Mike Hall, Peter Maxwell, and Anna Leslie
Seismic exploration in areas of rugged and extreme topography is dangerous, difficult and expensive. Because of these environmental and economic factors it is not uncommon for data acquired in such areas to be inadequately sampled in space for imaging purposes. Also, long source-receiver offsets are often required in order to…
An integrated strategy: constrained tomography inversion of multi-type data for near surface velocity model building
Liansheng Liu, Lidong Gao and Zhiyu Zhang
After analyzing the theory assumptions and the pros and cons of three methods in near surface model building, which have been widely used in data processing, the three of us all agree that an “Integrated Strategy”, based on constrained first arrival tomography inversion, should be introduced as described in this…
CRS azimuth gathers and CRS shot gathers for improved fault imaging in Alpine 3D seismic data
Henning Trappe, Eliakim Schuenemann, Juergen Pruessmann, Sonja Suckro, Hans-Gert Linzer, Martin Schachinger
In a case study from the Austrian Alps, the capability of Common-Reflection-Surface processing (CRS) for comprehensive fault imaging and analysis is demonstrated. CRS processing is used to generally improve the signal-to-noise ratio and to regularize the dataset in different domains. We show an offset-azimuth regularization to generate well populated gathers…
Introduction to April Technical Articles
Amanda Knowles
Because we had a surplus of fantastic papers for last month’s Value of Integrated Geophysics (VIG) Edition, the April RECORDER carries a continuation of similarly themed articles.
...
Geophysical Methods for Mapping a Shallow Unconsolidated Gas Sand
Rebecca Daniels and Brian Schulte
In southwest Saskatchewan Talisman Energy holds the surface to basement rights in several sections of land over an older Devonian Birdbear field. Producers in this area have re-visited this field, drilling for heavy oil in the thin, unconsolidated McLaren sands draped over Devonian highs. These new wells utilize Cold Heavy…
Reliable Geophysics
Marian C. Hanna and Doug Uffen
Geophysics rocks! If you are a geophysicist and you’re reading, this you know what geophysics can offer, but does your team know that too? It is fair to say that over the past ten (10) years, the E&P industry has seen a step increase in seismic acquisition and processing, especially…
Hierarchical Seismic Imaging: A Multiscale Approach
Jean Virieux
Different challenges of resources discovery and management, better mitigation of natural hazards, and acute understanding of the earth’s system require high-resolution imaging of the earth in more complex regions at various scales. Dense multicomponent surveys with a broad range of frequencies have been deployed by the industrial and academic communities…
