Articles
Introduction To March Focus: Value of Integrated Geophysics
Amanda Knowles
For years I have lived my life by the mantra, ‘When you don’t know what to do, you know what to do: research!’ There is great comfort knowing that you can turn to history or more knowledgeable, experienced people to provide facts and guide you. This tactic can be applied…
Overview of VIG Columns in RECORDER: May 2013 – March 2014
George Fairs
As part of the VIG (Value of Integrated Geophysics) initiative, a series of articles and columns were published in the RECORDER from May 2013 until May 2014 inclusive. The purpose was to advance the use of geophysics for business purposes by educating and inspiring our readership. The articles and columns…
Articulating the time, cost, and benefits of a seismic processing project
Lee Hunt
The net value of seismic is measured in various ways, but is usually reduced to a calculation of what additional economic benefit we expect to gain from the seismic information, weighed against the cost of the seismic information itself. The costs of the seismic are typically assumed to be quite…
Rock Physics Driven Seismic Data Processing for the Athabasca Oil Sands, Northeastern Alberta
David Gray, Seann Day and Scott Schapper
Canada has the third largest oil reserves of any country in the world. The bulk of the economically recoverable oil reserves is bitumen found in Alberta; Alberta has 26.7 Gm3 of remaining crude bitumen reserves (Alberta Oil Sands Industry Quarterly Update, Summer 2013). The Athabasca Oil Sands reservoirs of Northeastern…
VOQC: Value Oriented Quality Control in Seismic Processing
Lee Hunt, Peter Cary, Dan Tican, Mike Perz, Ritesh Kumar Sharma, Nirupama Nagarajappa, Xinxiang Li, and Satinder Chopra
The practicality of carrying out similar work to that of our case study example may be debated by some. There is little doubt that the phase and scaling issues that we encountered do require further thought. Our approach of applying single constant phase corrections and amplitude scalers to the gathers…
Value In Integrated Geophysics Where Do We Go From Here?
John L.J. Duhault
You have now read or scanned through several articles that embrace the concept of adding value by illustrating how one can improve the return on capital for their own oil and gas properties. Where is the VIG going for 2015 and beyond?
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Known Knowns, Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns in Land Exploration Seismology
Peter Cary
We geophysicists and geologists are generally not eager to compare ourselves with politicians. We are, after all, scientists who come to an understanding of nature from evidence of what is true rather from what we want to be true. But in this case Rumsfield’s efforts to infer definite conclusions about…
Introduction To February Focus: Electromagnetic Methods
Martyn Unsworth
This special issue of the CSEG RECORDER features three contributed articles describing recent developments in electromagnetic (EM) methods. While EM methods were some of the first geophysical methods to be developed for mineral exploration, they were rapidly surpassed by the number of seismic surveys undertaken in hydrocarbon exploration. Thus today…
Imaging SAGD steam chambers: traditional ERT vs broadband electromagnetic methods
Sarah G. R. Devriese and Douglas W. Oldenburg
The Athabasca oil sands, located in Northern Alberta, Canada, are one of the largest oil reserves in the world. Over the last 30 years, industry has developed the Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) method to extract heavy oil that is too viscous to be extracted using conventional methods and is…
New developments in audio-magnetotelluric exploration: Case study from Darnley Bay area, N.W.T
David K. Goldak and Ryan W. Olson
Darnley Bay occurs within the Amundsen Gulf and is located within the Inuvialuit settlement region of the Western Canadian Arctic. It is home to one of the largest gravity anomalies in the world. With a diameter of approximately 60 km and an amplitude exceeding 130 mGal, the source of the…
Magnetotelluric studies of lithospheric structure beneath Western Canada: insights into plate tectonics both past and present
Martyn Unsworth
Electromagnetic (EM) methods were originally developed for mineral exploration owing to the large contrast in electrical resistivity between many ore bodies and the host rock. They have subsequently found application in a range of fields including geothermal exploration, hydrogeology and environmental geophysics. In addition to applied studies, EM methods are…
A New Perspective on Shallow Water Flow (SWF) Prediction and the Prevention of Sinking Well-Heads in Deepwater Settings
Selim Simon Shaker
A new study integrating the seismic velocity profile with a proposed subsurface geopressure partition sheds light on a possible cause of shallow water flow (SWF) sands and sinking well heads in deepwater settings. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), previously known as MMS, reported 157 cases of SWF in…
Signal Processing and Physics-Based Approaches to Seismic Data Regularization
Aaron Stanton
In recent years seismic data interpolation has been a major focus area for geophysical research. These efforts aim to compensate for inadequate spatial sampling of sources and receivers to precondition the data for prestack migration. Interpolation algorithms rely on a variety of signal processing strategies with the underlying assumption that…
Introduction To January Focus: Oil Sands
David Gray
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Strategies to fill in the details for an oil sands reservoir: Kinosis example
Dragana Todorovic-Marinic, David Gray and Jan Dewar
In developing an oil sands play, the task facing the geoscientist is to build a detailed characterization of a three-dimensionally complex reservoir to position horizontal wells precisely and optimally. There is usually no shortage of data to examine. In fact, terabytes of information about the reservoir are often collected. The…
Characterization of the Albian Lower Grand Rapids Formation, Cold Lake, Alberta
Tammy Willmer and Garrett Quinn
The Alberta Energy Regulator estimates 10.0 billion m3 (62.9 billion barrels) of bitumen initially in place within the Albian-aged Lower Grand Rapids Formation (LGR) in the Cold Lake Oil Sands Region (Marsh and Honarvar, 2014). Despite this significant resource estimate, development of the zone lags behind other bitumen reservoirs in…
Microseismic Monitoring Applications in Heavy Oil Reservoirs
Ted Urbancic and Katie Jeziorski
Heavy oil or partially depleted conventional reservoirs typically require some form of stimulation to mobilize the oil. For more than a decade, steam injection programs in heavy oil reservoirs such as Cyclic Steam Stimulation, Huff and Puff, SAGD or some combination thereof have utilized microseismic monitoring to track steam movement…
A New Approach to Pore Pressure Predictions Generation, Expulsion and Retention Trio: Case Histories
Selim Simon Shaker
A comprehensive framework and fresh perspective to pore pressure prediction methods and algorithms based on the established geological building blocks is presented. Applying the suggested four subsurface zones is the backbone of this pore pressure prediction approach. Determining the boundary of the four subsurface zones utilizing seismic data is crucial…
2b or not 2b? Interpreting Magnitude Distributions from Microseismic Catalogs
David Eaton
The Gutenberg-Richter b value, the slope of a logarithmic cumulative magnitude distribution graph, provides an indication of the relative abundance of large-tosmall magnitude events. Numerous studies have demonstrated that earthquake catalogs for seismically active fault systems typically show a long-term b value in the range of 0.75 to 1.25, depending…
Introduction To December Focus: A glimpse into the future of seismic imaging?
Rob Holt
Slowly, inexorably, prestack depth migration (PSDM) is replacing prestack time migration (PSTM) as our seismic imaging workhorse, just as prestack time migration previously replaced poststack time migration. We saw this first in the Canadian Foothills, where anisotropic PSDM is required to correctly position the images of our hydrocarbon-bearing reservoirs beneath…
