Articles

Geophysics and a Reserve Audit Perspective

Doug Uffen

It is a yearly exercise that plays out for every oil and gas company in Canada. Due to National Instrument NI 51-101, producing oil and gas companies report their reserves on an annual basis. Through this process, companies wish to have their efforts and achievements recognized as having added value…

Quantify the Economic Value of Geophysical Information

David Gray

Geophysics is one of the best tools to identify hydrocarbons in the absence of well control. Recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has allowed the use of “Reliable Technology” in reserve estimation for disclosure purposes. Therefore, the use of new technologies presents a significant opportunity for geophysics to become…

Advances in “True Volume” Interpretation of Structure and Stratigraphy in 3D Volumes

Geoffrey A. Dorn

The use of 3-D seismic interpretation and visualization in today’s industry has become pervasive in exploration and development. All modern 3-D interpretation systems and many well path planning systems use 3-D visualization as the base display for the interaction required to conduct the work at hand. However, the tools and…

Integration of Surface Seismic and Microseismic Part 2: Understanding Hydraulic Fracture Variability

Shawn Maxwell, David Cho and Mark Norton

Integration of microseismicity and reservoir properties has been used to design better well placement, improved stimulations and enhanced production of wells in the Montney shale in NE British Columbia, Canada. In a companion paper, observations were presented of how reservoir heterogeneity in terms of Poisson’s ratio and pre-existing faults impacted…

Mixed-phase wavelet estimation – A case study

Somanath Misra and Satinder Chopra

An accurate estimation of wavelet is crucial in the deconvolution of seismic data. As per the convolution model, the recorded seismic trace is the result of convolution of the earth’s unknown reflectivity series with the propagating seismic source wavelet along with the additive noise. The deconvolution of the source wavelet…

Quantitative estimates of fracture density variations: further perspectives

Lee Hunt, Scott Reynolds, Tyson Brown, and Scott Hadley; Jon Downton and Satinder Chopra

We have undertaken a quantitative investigation of the accuracy of surface seismic attributes in predicting fracture density variations within the Nordegg Formation in West Central Alberta. These results were first discussed at the GeoCanada 2010 convention (Hunt et al, 2010) and also published in The Leading Edge (Hunt et al,…

Integration of Surface Seismic and Microseismic for the Characterization of a Shale Gas Reservoir

Mark Norton, Wayne Hovdebo, David Cho, Shawn Maxwell, Mike Jones

Unconventional resources such as shale and tight gas plays require engineering disciplines to develop solutions to achieve economic production levels. However, reservoir heterogeneity as seen in various forms of data has prompted for a better understanding of reservoir properties to optimize drilling and completion programs.

Seismic methods for reservoir characterization…

Shale Gas and Geophysical Developments

Dave Monk, David Close, Marco Perez, and Bill Goodway

Natural gas has an eclectic mix of interest groups promoting its increased utilization. Environmentalists are focused on the reductions in CO2 and particulate emissions relative to coal for base electricity generation. North American based gas suppliers stress the increased energy security of using domestic energy sources and the potential to…

The Shale Mystery Tour (Europe)

John Logel

Shale gas is nothing new to North America. The first known shale producing well was in New York State in 1820. Although, if you look at conferences, journal articles, and contractor offerings; it might appear to be a new and exciting area of oil and gas business. The change occurred…

Rumblings from the Laboratory: Past, Present, and Future

Carl Sondergeld

The complexity of rocks in nature, and its resultant imprint on rock properties, makes empirical laboratory studies necessary and relevant. Numerous efforts are underway in academia and industry to try and use theoretical models to predict petrophysical and seismic rock properties from microscale images of rocks. However, modeling can only…

Thomas Bayes versus the wedge model

Jason M. McCrank, Gary F. Margrave and Don C. Lawton

This paper demonstrates the use of the Bayesian inference to estimate model parameters in a synthetic example. The demonstration data are a set of zero-offset seismograms synthesized from a variation on the wedge model that thins in a general trend but with thickness that varies randomly about that trend. The…

SAGD Well Planning Using Stochastic Seismic Inversion

Franck Delbecq and Rémi Moyen

The complexity of heavy oil geology in SAGD (Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage) projects, especially in the presence of thin shale barriers that are beyond the resolution of traditional deterministic seismic inversion, makes the integration of seismic data with well data challenging. Stochastic inversion represents an improvement over deterministic inversion in…

The Contribution of HRAM Data to Exploration in Canada: An Overview

Zeev Berger, Martin Mushayandebvu and Michelle Boast

High resolution Magnetic (HRAM) data has been flown over most of the active sedimentary basins of the world. These data has been widely used for exploration and exploitation of both frontier and mature basins. The objective of this paper is to show case studies where HRAM data interpretation has made…

It’s the Fluids that Count

Mike Batzle

Locating and identifying pore fluids is usually the ultimate goal of any geophysical activity. This not only involves oil and gas recovery, but also assessing ground water resources and tracking pollution plumes. As we strive to make geophysical methods, particularly seismic results, more quantitative, we must have a thorough understanding…

Depth Conversion and Seismic Lithology Inversion of a McMurray Oil Sands Reservoir

Rainer Tonn

The Lower Cretaceous McMurray Formation in NE Alberta is a prolific oil sands reservoir. In Statoil Canada Ltd. Leismer leases, about 100 km south of Fort McMurray, the bitumen saturated reservoir lies at a depth of approximately 450 m with SAGD (Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage) being the optimal method for…

Seismic Wave Phenomena and Implications for Accuracy of Microseismic Results

B. Fuller, L. Engelbrecht, R. Van Dok, M. Sterling, M. Kniffin, and L. Walter

A primary goal of microseismic surveys is to locate the origination point of seismic events that occur in response to hydraulic fracture stimulation in a reservoir. Accurately locating the origin point of seismic events relies upon a complete understanding of wavefield propagation phenomena that occur in the environment of the…

The more we listen the more we see: Microseismic monitoring of induced seismicity is coming of age

Juan M. Reyes-Montes, Will S. Pettitt and R. Paul Young

The growing demand of energy and resources from society has moved the energy industry to maximize the productivity of reservoirs and search into the exploitation of new resources in increasingly challenging environments. Technologies such as Enhanced Oil Recovery and Engineered Geothermal Systems have become normal practice in the exploitation and…

Microseismic Moment Tensors: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

David W. Eaton and Farshid Forouhideh

Seismic moment tensors provide a general mathematical representation of point sources that can be used to distinguish between various microseismic source types. We use synthetic tests with borehole receiver arrays to determine the geometrical conditions necessary to estimate reliably the six independent components of a full moment tensor by leastsquares…

How much experience is enough?

Tom Sneddon

Maybe it’s just me, but every day when I arrive at the jobsite I feel like this day’s challenges are different from anything I’ve done before. I think that maybe someone more experienced than me should be called in for advice on whatever topic needs to be tackled. This has…

Refraction Statics: The Art and Science of Near-Surface Interpretation

Chuck Diggins

Every step in refraction statics determination involves intrepretation. On acquisition, many decisions impact the quality of the refraction analysis: array lengths, group and shot intervals, furthest distance, wide vs narrow azimuth, source types, receiver types, etc. Each of these decisions should and probably rarely or never are considered from the…