Articles
Optimal restriction modeling
Keith Millis, Case Caulfield and Andrea Crook
Restrictions to seismic acquisition increasingly limit the positioning of both sources and receivers at theoretically prescribed locations. Designing and subsequently repositioning station locations with respect to those restrictions has become an important and time-conscience aspect of both land and marine seismic programs. Historically, deviations from theoretical locations are prescribed in…
On cost equivalent Mega-Bin and orthogonal geometries in five-dimensional space
Dale Harger and Jason Schweigert
There have been several comparisons of Mega-Bin and orthogonal 3D seismic survey designs over the years. In this paper, we demonstrate a different way to normalize the two types of surveys by creating each design so as to have identical field acquisition efforts and costs. From this vantage point the…
An evaluation of single vibrator, single sweep, 3D seismic acquisition in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin
Paul Thacker, Dale Harger and Doug Iverson
This case history presents two examples of single vibrator, single sweep, 3D seismic data acquired in Alberta during 2013. The first example, from Western Alberta in the Duvernay play fairway, used full size vibrators and was acquired as a zero-risk validation of the technique at the end of a conventional…
Introduction to April Focus: Anisotropy: Characterization of Reservoirs
Satinder Chopra
Traditionally, seismic reservoir characterization has aimed at the determination of reservoir thickness, pore fluid, porosity and water saturation, amongst other properties. This has been done by using the available tools for integrating the well log and seismic data as well as the derived attributes for transforming them into the desired…
Characterization of the dolomite reservoirs with the help of photoelectric index volume
Ritesh Kumar Sharma, Satinder Chopra and Amit Kumar Ray
Carbonate sedimentary rocks that have been fractured, or dolomitized and laterally sealed by tight undolomitized limestone, are frequently seen to produce hydrocarbons. However, the differentiation between limestones and dolomites is a challenge. The purpose of this work is to describe a workflow for discriminating limestones and dolomites, and to map…
Seismic characterization of Montney shale formation using Passey’s approach
Ritesh Kumar Sharma, Satinder Chopra and Amit Kumar Ray
Seismic characterization of shale reservoir formations or source rocks is an important goal, considering the high level of activity in oil companies that are engaged in shale-resource exploitation across North America. Well logging carried out in these formations yields some of the measured parameters helping us understand their properties. Resistivity…
Seismic discontinuity attributes and Sobel filtering
Satinder Chopra, Rajive Kumar and Kurt J. Marfurt
Mapping geologic edges such as faults or channel levees forms a critical component in the interpretation on 3D seismic volumes. While the more prominent features can often be easily visualized, smaller features critical to understanding the structural and depositional environment can be easily overlooked. Careful manual interpretation of such features…
Seismic Imaging in the Presence of Strong Contrasts – How forgetful are seismic waves?
Bernd Milkereit
Seismic imaging is an important geophysical tool for delineating and monitoring the earth’s subsurface structure and its oil, gas and mineral resources. Owing to the earth’s heterogeneity, such subsurface structures exist at different scales (sizes) with lateral and vertical variations in physical properties such as contrasts in bulk and shear…
Introduction to March Focus: Anisotropy: 5D Interpolation
Mike Perz
Out of all the innovation to take place over the past 20 years in land processing, I believe that 5D interpolation has emerged as the single most important algorithm. Whether or not you agree with me, you cannot deny the importance of 5D interpolation (or “5D” for short) in today’s…
Five-dimensional interpolation: New directions and challenges
Daniel Trad
Five-dimensional (5D) interpolation has been in the industry for almost ten years now, and has become widely accepted and used. There are now a variety of implementations, with different algorithms and flavors. Our understanding of interpolation has grown greatly in the last decade because of its use in increasingly challenging…
Real vs. ‘5D’ Data: An analysis of acquired vs. interpolated data in both the post-stack and the pre-stack domains for parallel and orthogonal geometries
Emily Duncan, Ann O’Byrne and Jillian Dalsin
5D Interpolation was introduced in 2005 as an infill technique that ‘although not a substitute for well-sampled field data, … provides some useful data preconditioning that in particular allows migration techniques to work better’ (Trad et al., 2005). This multidimensional algorithm was pushed by the industry to overcome acquisition constraints…
No magic from 5D interpolation on a coarse 3D oilsands dataset – a case history
Sylvestre Charles, Jim Hostetler, Jiwu Lin, Xiaoming Luo, Kevin Roberts
This case history is based on a coarse 3D seismic dataset that was acquired for a commercial Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) project in the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta. In conjunction with a dense core-hole drilling program, this legacy 3D seismic dataset was acquired to better understand the geological…
Can interpolation improve QI?
Laurie M. Weston Bellman
It seems too good to be true – creating seismic data in processing at a fraction of the cost of actually recording it. Nevertheless, the practice of seismic interpolation has been an increasingly popular trend in recent years with the latest 5D algorithms becoming an integral piece of the pre-stack…
A Journey Through Time In Search of Arabian Giants – Oil/Gas Fields, Recording Channels, and Petabytes
Peter I. Pecholcs
This journey began 22 years ago when I first arrived in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, the land of giant oil and gas fields. It was at a time when the search began for new giants outside the Eastern Province (Retained Area 1), which is home to the world’s largest oil field…
Introduction to February Focus: Anisotropy: Fractures and Faults
Rob Kendall
Welcome to this special issue of the RECORDER that presents five papers on fractures and anisotropy. While this theme has been in and out of the spotlight for many years, we are seeing novel approaches for extracting even more information from the data than we were a mere five years…
On Hookean solids in seismology: anisotropy and fractures
Michael A. Slawinski
Geophysics—similarly to astrophysics—relies on remote sensing. Inferring material properties of the Earth’s interior is akin to inferring the composition of a distant star. In both cases, scientists rely on matching theoretical predictions or explanations with observations. Notably, obtaining a sample of a material from the interior of our planet might…
Results from diverse fracture analysis methodologies: consistent, contradictory, or complementary?
M. Perz, P. Cary, X. Li, S. Chopra, and L. Hunt
We examine four independent approaches to fracture detection using surface-seismic data. Fundamental algorithmic properties and limitations are studied in an attempt to explain observed differences between the attributes generated from the various approaches. Real data examples are presented, including one which demonstrates simultaneous analysis of all four techniques and which…
Case study: 3C and 9C prestack shear wave splitting analysis at Big Sky
Jeff P. Grossman and Gulia Popov
We present a tutorial style case study in which we compare two approaches to shear wave splitting (SWS) analysis and layer stripping on a subset of 3-D 9-C data from Montana. The first, and perhaps more familiar method, utilizes converted wave, or PS data, while the second utilizes pure shear…
Anisotropic moment tensor inversion and visualization applied to a dual well monitoring survey
S. Leaney, X. Yu, C. Chapman, L. Bennett, S. Maxwell, J. Rutledge and J. Duhault
In this paper we review the workflow used for anisotropic moment tensor inversion and visualization applied to a dual well monitoring survey from the West Pembina field in Alberta. The workflow makes use of an exact, dynamic, layered VTI ray-tracer that allows for constant dip. Included are a description of…
Evaluating fracture-induced anisotropy using borehole microseismic data
J-M Kendall, J.P. Verdon and A.F. Baird
For decades passive seismic monitoring has been a routinely used tool in earthquake engineering, mining and geothermal industries. In the past 10 years its use in the petroleum industry has seen an order of magnitude growth: in terms of annual revenue the global market is now more than a ¼…
