Articles
Multicomponent Case Study: One Company’s Experience in Eastern Alberta
Paul Anderson and Ron Larson
In 2004, Apache embarked on an investigation of multicomponent technology. One of the projects undertaken was a target of upper-Mannville channel sands, specifically the Rex member. Some of this work was presented by Monk et al. in the May 2006 RECORDER, however additional efforts have been put into the analysis…
My take on the interaction of Engineers and Geophysicists
Brad Culver
You know, I have always enjoyed my career path. One of my simplest pleasures has been derived from the fact that few individuals know what we geophysicists do, even fewer know how to pronounce it. That has always made my job mysterious. I get called a geologist most of the…
Seismic Skeletonization: A Useful Tool for Geophysical Data Analysis
K. Vasudevan, F. A. Cook, and D. W. Eaton
Automated event picking of reflection seismic and georadar data allows an interpreter to analyse coherent events using a variety of statistical tools. The success of such tools in exploration is well-documented (Taner et al., 1979; Robertson and Fisher, 1988; Barnes, 1993; Chen and Sidney, 1997; Marfurt et al., 1998; Schmitt,…
Numerical Solutions of Seismic Scattering in Heterogeneous Media
Jun-Wei Huang, Thomas Bohlen and Bernd Milkereit
Analytical solutions of seismic wave propagation are available in restricted cases such as homogenous or layered homogenous models, or targets with regular shape or smooth property variations. As seismologists try to quantify the Earth with high resolution, these models are oversimplified and only valid for particular purposes. Heterogeneities commonly exist…
White Rose seismic with well data constraints—less art and more science: A case history
Ayiaz Kaderali
The White Rose Oil Field is located offshore in the Jeanne d’Arc Basin, 350km East of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Husky is the operator with a 72.5 percent working interest in the field. The field was discovered in 1984, and consists of both oil and gas pools. The…
New seismic and other geophysical equipment at the University of Calgary
Don Lawton and Malcolm Bertram
The Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Calgary has recently purchased leading-edge seismic and other geophysical equipment for research programs and for the education and training of undergraduate and graduate students. Purchase of this equipment was made possible through a grant of $1.2 million from the Provincial…
Geophysical Inversion Workshop and Summer School: A Big Success
Peter Cary
The 2nd Geophysical Inversion Workshop and Seismic Imaging Summer School took place in August this past summer on the University of Calgary campus. This extremely successful meeting was enjoyed by about 80 attendees at the workshop and about 50 registrants in the summer school. Dr. Gary Margrave, the main organizer…
Non-first-break technology to remove effects of shallow velocity anomalies
Emil Blias
As was analytically shown in the first paper (Blias, 2006a) shallow velocity anomalies can cause large lateral variations in stacking velocities. Non-removed shallow velocity anomalies (SVAs) can reduce the quality of the post-stack image and create time distortions in seismic horizons. A conventional approach to deal with SVAs utilizes first…
An example of a fully integrated Reservoir Characterization project utilizing well data, fluid substitutions, elastic modeling, production history, seismic and AVO attributes
Brian Schulte
AVO has played a significant role in exploration over the last 20 years. However, the use of amplitudes as a direct hydrocarbon indicator is still not as reliable as desired. On the other hand experience demonstrates some of the issues needed to be addressed exist within the seismic data itself.
... The Future of Interpretation Software
Doug Paul
The Canadian oil and gas industry has changed significantly over the last ten years. Soaring hydrocarbon prices combined with the emergence of trusts and small exploration companies have changed the landscape of the energy sector. As the petroleum industry becomes even more competitive, a premium is placed on the explorationist…
Preliminary Seismic Interpretation and Maps for the Paleogene-Neogene (Tertiary) Succession, Orphan Basin
Renee Burton-Ferguson, Michael Enachescu, Rick Hiscott
The Orphan Basin, located offshore Newfoundland and Labrador, is one of the largest under-explored basins along the eastern Canadian Margin. With large 3D seismic surveys executed in 2004-2005 and a deepwater well planned for 2006, the basin has become the new focus area for hydrocarbon exploration in Atlantic Canada. The…
Time-Frequency Polarization Analysis and Filtering
Rob Pinnegar
Most of the “traditional” methods of polarization analysis and polarization filtering operate entirely in the time domain, or entirely in the frequency (or Fourier) domain. Unfortunately, both approaches have major limitations. Time-domain methods often have difficulty dealing with overlapping events that have different frequencies; and frequency-domain methods can run into…
Curvature attribute applications to 3D surface seismic data
Satinder Chopra and Kurt Marfurt
Identifying subtle faults at or below the limits of seismic resolution and predicting fractures associated with folds and flexures is one of the major objectives of careful seismic interpretation. With the common use of 3D seismic in the late 1980s, 1st derivative based horizon dip magnitude and dip azimuth were…
The effects of interbed multiples and attenuation (Q) on the mapping of conventional and unconventional reservoirs
John Logel
Seismic Attributes have been one of the primary identification/ evaluation methods throughout the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin and stratigraphic column, first on 2D data and now predominantly on 3D seismic. Seismic data have limitations and ambiguities that have been stretched and in some cases blatantly abused. Seismic data were first…
Estimating Intrinsic Layer Anisotropy ηlayer From Surface Seismic
K. Stinson, E. Crase, Wai-kin Chan, S. Levy
The anisotropic parameters (Vnmo , ηeffective) are now routinely and robustly estimated from anisotropic prestack time migration velocity analysis. The availability of these parameters opens the possibility for determination of parameters potentially valuable for interpretation, such as layered intrinsic anisotropic layer ηlayer.
In this work, we demonstrate the value and…
Automatic high-density constrained velocity picking
Emil Blias
Velocity analysis is one of the main steps in seismic processing. A velocity model, beyond its initial purpose to obtain a seismic stack, is used for time and depth imaging, AVO analysis and inversion, pore pressure prediction and so on. In conventional processing, it is a high cost procedure and…
Can hydrocarbon saturation be estimated using density contrast parameter?
Nurul Kabir, Richard Crider, Rosemarie Ramkhelawan and Charlie Baynes
The density contrast parameter may reveal important and crucial information about the presence and saturation of hydrocarbon. In this paper, we demonstrate the relation between density contrast and gas saturation and a methodology for extracting this parameter from seismic data. We used both the linear and nonlinear formulation of the…
Awards for the 2006 CSPG/CSEG/CWLS Joint Convention
Awards for the 2006 CSPG/CSEG/CWLS Joint Convention technical papers.
... An East-Central Alberta Multi-Component Seismic Case History
Dave Monk, Ron Larson and Paul Anderson
How does a large independent oil company leap into technology and methodology that are relatively new to the industry, and certainly new to the company in question? Having never worked with multi-component seismic acquisition and processing, Apache Corp. decided in 2004 that the time was right for the company to…
