Articles
New Science Centre 2011 Project
Maureen Henderson
What is the New Science Centre 2011 Project? For those individuals from the geoscience community who did not attend the recent ‘model tour’ presentation at TELUS World of Science – Calgary, this might be a tough question to answer. In our quest to bring clarity to this question, our hope…
Lessons Learned from 3-D Seismic Attribute Studies of Hydrothermal Dolomite Reservoirs
Bruce S. Hart, Justine A. Sagan, and Osareni C. Ogiesoba
Hydrothermal dolomite reservoirs present special exploration and development problems that are important to seismic interpreters. The productive, porous dolomites can be present at various stratigraphic levels and are typically associated with complex faulting and fracture networks (Figure 1). These structures acted as conduits for the dolomitizing, and porosity generating, fluids.…
Preliminary Evaluation of a Potential Major Petroleum Province from BeaufortSPAN™ Seismic Data: Canadian Arctic Passive Margin, Banks Island Segment
Naresh Kumar, James Helwig, and Menno G. Dinkelman
Because of its thick sediment wedge and large structures, the exploration focus in Arctic Canada has been on Beaufort- Mackenzie Delta for more than thirty years. This effort has resulted in 48 oil and gas discoveries with a combined volume in excess of 1 billion barrels equivalent (Chen and others,…
The Sound of Sonic: A Historical Perspective and Introduction to Acoustic Logging
D. Close, D. Cho, F. Horn, and H. Edmundson
It is fair to say that surface seismic data are the staple of the typical oilfield geophysicist’s diet and that gamma ray and porosity logs provide the nutrients required by petrophysicists and geologists. The acoustic, or sonic, log, however, is the ketchup (or condiment of choice) used liberally by both…
Integrating Seismic Acquisition and Processing
Jack Bouska
Years of seismic specialization among practicing geophysicists have segregated acquisition, processing, and interpretation into separate functions, which makes it difficult for any individual to treat the whole seismic process as a single integrated system.
... Geophysical Well Logs from a Shallow Test Well and Automatic Determination of Formation Velocities from Full-Waveform Sonic Logs
J. Wong, L. Han, R.R. Stewart, L.R. Bentley, and J.C. Bancroft
Shallow VSP and geophysical well logging surveys were undertaken in a 127 m-deep well located at the Rothney Astrophysical Observatory site near Priddis, Alberta. The well was drilled through interbedded sands and shales of the Paskapoo Formation. A suite of geophysical well logs (including natural gamma-ray, normal resistivity, focusedbeam resistivity,…
Processing Considerations for 3D VSP
Richard Kuzmiski, Bob Charters and Mike Galbraith
VSP surveys have long been known to produce superior reflection images compared to images from surface seismic. The literature is rife with examples showing the advantages of the VSP method. This paper shows how 2D and 3D VSP data is processed with practical state-of-the-art technology and algorithms. The key steps…
Microseismic Location Uncertainty
Shawn Maxwell
Microseismic imaging is a common technique for mapping hydraulic fractures. Accurate imaging of the source location of the microseisms is critical for accurate fracture mapping. In this paper, two simple synthetic examples are presented which demonstrate the mislocation that could result from data and velocity model errors. Location errors resulting…
A New View of the Continent Beneath Our Feet – LITHOPROBE’S Scientific, Economic and Social Contributions
Ron M. Clowes
LITHOPROBE is Canada’s national, collaborative, multidisciplinary, Earth science research project established to develop a comprehensive understanding of the evolution of the northern half of North America. Canada’s landmass and continental margin are a complex geological mosaic representing four billion years of continental growth, destruction and reorganization. How the current configuration…
Seismic Physical Modelling at the University of Calgary
J. Wong, Kevin W. Hall, E.V. Gallant, R. Maier, M.B. Bertram, and D.C. Lawton
The University of Calgary Seismic Physical Modelling Facility, in existence since 1985, has been an important tool for seismic exploration research for many years. However, by the standards of the 21st century, it was badly outdated and needed significant improvements. In recent years, we have overhauled and modernized the facility,…
Seismic Models of Reflections from Attenuating Layers
Richard L. Gibson, Jr. and Pierre Thore
The search for effective direct hydrocarbon indicators has motivated the development of a broad variety of methods that seek to make use of seismic data for locating economic reservoirs in the subsurface. One of the best known approaches is the analysis of amplitude variation with offset (AVO), which often provides…
Improving the Reservoir Modeling of Compressional Structures
Karen S. Hoffman
The incorporation of faults into reservoir models has often been a fragmented process with different faults being treated in different ways. Despite the fact that faults can significantly impact fluid flow within the reservoir with the correct fault fluid flow characterization often critical to getting a good history match and…
Earth Scientists more relevant than ever to oil and gas industry
Susan R. Eaton
During the fall of 2008, the Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences (the “CFES”) issued a report entitled Human Resources Needs in Earth Sciences in Canada. Dubbed Canada’s ‘first-ever,’ multi-sector survey – spanning government agencies, academic institutions, and the petroleum, mining, environmental and geotechnical industries – the report voiced concerns about…
My Career in Geophysics: Becoming an Explorationist
Robert Mummery
When asked to write about my career in geophysics, I was initially perplexed. Although I have worked closely with geophysical data for over twenty-five years, my formal training was in “classical” geology. I have morphed from “hard rock” to “soft rock” geology and from geologist to exploration geoscientist. Some of…
Connecting active and passive seismic to describe geomechanical rock properties
Bill Goodway
The reflection seismic method has its origins in the Earthquake Seismology studies of the nature and types of elastic seismic waves released from an earthquake source. Observations of these waves at the earth’s surface, have led to an understanding of the theoretical basis for elastic compressional P-wave and shear S-wave…
Noise reduction by structure-and-amplitude-preserving multi-channel deconvolution
Juefu Wang and Mauricio Sacchi
We pose seismic noise reduction as an inverse problem. The clean data are obtained by minimizing a cost function that uses a priori information about the spatial continuity of reflectors. The optimization problem is solved by introducing a smoothing operator that reduces the difference between adjacent traces along seismic events.…
Early Cenozoic Hyperthermals: The Sedimentary Record of Rapid Global Warming and Massive Carbon Input
Gerald R. Dickens
The “Greenhouse Earth” of the late Paleocene and early Eocene was generally characterized by warm temperatures and elevated Partial Pressure of Carbon Dioxide (pCO2). During this time, however, at least two “hyperthermals” occurred, the most pronounced corresponding to the Paleocene/Eocene Boundary ca. 55 million years ago (Ma). These were geologically…
The Effectiveness of Seismic Fracture Detection Techniques in Tight Reservoirs – examples from WCSB
Christian Abaco
Unconventional gas resources, including tight sands and carbonates, coalbed methane, and gas shales, constitute some of the largest components of remaining natural gas resources in North America. The main challenge in producing gas from tight rocks is generally their low permeability however, these unconventional reservoirs can exhibit significant permeability variations…
A Convenient Truth: Radial Trace Filtering—Simple and Effective
David Henley
Seismic processing sometimes has something of a “mystique” associated with it, that compels us to use only the most theoretically correct or sophisticated algorithms to accomplish specific tasks on our data sets. Because of this, we sometimes overlook or ignore methods which are not as intellectually satisfying, but which, nevertheless,…
