Articles
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 However, by the standards of the 21st century, it was badly outdated and needed significant improvements.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,…
A Question from the December (2008) luncheon…
Lee Hunt
At the CSEG luncheon of December 15, 2008, Jon Downton and I delivered a talk in which we evaluated the effectiveness of an interpolation process applied prior to pre-stack imaging. The focus of this analysis was the ability of the interpolator to minimize migration noise caused be geometric irregularities on…
Why Did I Apply Pre-Stack Interpolation to a Tightly Shot Plains 3-D?
Lee Hunt; Pat McKenny and Dave Levesque; Glenn Hauer and Oliver Kuhn
A 3-D seismic survey was purchased over a channel sand development play that was known to be charged with gas, oil, and water. The 3-D seismic data was of very high quality, and it was initially felt that finding a structurally high location with indications of good reservoir quality would…
Hard hats and mortarboards: The industry and university working together
Robert Stewart, Don Lawton, Gary Margrave, and Laurence Lines
University and industry goals can complement each other. Thus, there is considerable advantage to a university-industry partnership, especially in applied geophysics. This article discusses a consortium model for the collaboration and provides an example – the CREWES Project at the University of Calgary. The mandate of the CREWES Project is…
Interpolation, PSTM, & AVO for Viking and Nisku Targets in West Central Alberta
L.Hunt, S.Reynolds, S.Hadley, M.Hadley, J.Downton, D. Trad, B.Durrani
West Central Alberta has a thick stratigraphic section (up to 5000m) with multiple exploration and development targets in conventional clastic, carbonate, tight sand, and shale reservoirs. Compressional and extensional structural features are common throughout this large region, particularly further west. The area has extensive 3D seismic coverage, but that coverage…
Reflections on Q
Laurence Lines, Fereidoon Vasheghani, and Sven Treitel
Seismic reflections are generally caused by contrasts in acoustical impedance. However, in media where there is significant absorption of seismic energy, reflections can also be caused by contrasts in the seismic absorption coefficient (or inverse-Q values). This note derives the reflection coefficient for a normally incident acoustical wave and then…
AVO Crossplotting Revisited: A Practitioner’s Perspective
Heath Pelletier
The development of AVO crossplot analysis has been the subject of much discussion over the past decade and has provided interpreters with new tools for meeting exploration objectives. Papers by Ross (2000) and Simm et al. (2000) provide blueprints for performing AVO crossplot interpretation. These articles refer to the Castagna…
Petrophysical Models for the Seismic Velocity of Cracked Media
Zimin Zhang and Robert Stewart
Two petrophysical models for cracked media are investigated in this paper: the Kuster-Toksöz (1974) model for randomly oriented cracks and Hudson’s (1981) model for aligned cracks. We consider the effects of crack shape, aspect ratio, and crack density using rock properties from several field locations: the Ross Lake heavy oil…
Strange but True Stories of Synthetic Seismograms
Paul Anderson and Rachel Newrick
Synthetic seismograms are critical in understanding seismic data. We rely upon them for an array of tasks, from identifying events on seismic data to estimating the full waveform for inversion. That said, we often create and use synthetic seismograms without much thought given to the input log data or erroneous…
2009 Election of Officers Candidates
2009 Election of Officers Candidates
... Reflections on the Future of Applied Geophysics
No Abstract Available.
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