Articles
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.
... To Kill or to Complement: Three Technology Improvements in Foothills Seismic Imaging
Rob Vestrum and Jon Gittins
The nature of technology development is to improve on current, established methods. New technology can supersede older technology, but often the older method has certain characteristics– robustness, low cost, ease-of-use, etc– that give the older method longevity in the face of its upstart rival. When dealing with seismic data for…
An introduction to common offset vector trace gathering
Xinxiang Li
This paper is an introductory review of the recently developed concept of common offset vector (COV) trace gathering. The COV trace gathering is a 3D generalization of conventional 2D offset gathering. A COV gather is a similar but different representation of a common-offset common azimuth gather. For many types of…
Highlights of Petroleum and Crustal Framework of the US Chukchi Shelf: Key Results from the ChukchiSPAN Survey
Menno Dinkelman, Naresh Kumar, James Helwig, Pete Emmet and James Granath
he US Chukchi Shelf is a highly prospective petroleum province with estimated mean technically recoverable resources of more than 29 billion barrels (4.6 billion cubic meters) of oil equivalent (MMS, 2006). Because of the remoteness of the area offshore of northwest Alaska and the high cost of operations, there has…
Personal Professionalism and the Geophysics Practitioner
Tom Sneddon
Geophysics is a great profession. Much of the technology we Geoscientists take for granted has its roots firmly embedded in solutions to earth science’s problems developed by geophysicists. This is certainly true in the Alberta oil and gas industry.
... Weed Awareness and the Seismic Industry
Andrew Stiles
The Seismic Industry prides itself on having a relatively small environmental footprint and an attitude of continuous improvement. Setting up our project areas to renew themselves through natural processes is always the desire d outcome. When we look at the two biggest human initiated threats to biodiversity, we come up…
Oil Sands Reservoir Characterization. An Integrated Approach.
Laurie Weston Bellman
The Athabasca oil sands contain more than a trillion barrels of oil within the Cretaceous McMurray Formation of northeastern Alberta. In most of the oil sands area, the McMurray Formation is generally considered to be a compound estuarine valley system characterised by multiple cuts and fills. It is bounded below…
Calibrated AVO and LMR analysis using a new DHI flat-spot AVO class 6 fluid contact to mitigate reservoir risk at Stonehouse, offshore Nova Scotia
Bill Goodway, Chris Szelewski, Steve Overell, Norm Corbett and Terry Skrypnek
This article describes the Amplitude Variation with Offset ( AVO) and Lambda-Mu-Rho (LMR) analysis that followed the Pre-stack Depth Migration (PSDM) of a 2,000 km2 3D covering the shallower, prospective part of the relinquished deep water Stonehouse license offshore Nova Scotia.
... A wavefield extrapolation based summation for prestack depth and time migration
Jianhua Pan and Dan Negut
Wave equation migration (WEM) has been used in our industry for several years. Its ability to handle multiple arrivals from a surface position to a subsurface point provides us with higher quality images than Kirchhoff migration. However, apart from computational efficiency, WEM lacks some other advantages of Kirchhoff migration such…
It Pays to Plan
Brock Hassell, Ken Robinson, Cecelia Gowen and Darrell Daniels
We are heading into another winter operations season, and it appears as if the industry is going to be at least as busy as last year, and perhaps even more so. For those of you who are planning winter programs now is the time to ensure you’re maximizing the benefits…
Aggressively Passive: Microseismic opportunities over an oilfield’s life
Peter Duncan
Passive seismic, especially microseismic monitoring, is to conventional seismic as a stethoscope is to a sonograph. It is continuous 4-D. It is accomplished by listening carefully to the sounds emanating from the earth and then diagnosing what is happening down there. Passive seismic techniques not only can create an image…
