Articles
Junior Geophysicists Forum
Before we update you with news regarding our next event we figured we should update you with our name change. The Young Geophysicists Forum (YGF) has undergone a bit of a name change, and we figured now was the best time to do it. To be more in-line with terminology…
Winds of Change in Recording Seismic Data
Peter Maxwell and Jason Criss
In 500 BC, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote, “Nothing endures but Change”. When referring to man, the natural change of things is usually the result of endless attempts to make something better. When we visualize how seismic data recording will look in 10 years the only thing we know for…
Recent and future developments in marine acquisition technology: An unbiased opinion
Nick Moldoveanu
In June 2001, Gijs Vermeer was invited by the CSEG RECORDER to look at the future developments in seismic acquisition. It was a rather difficult task, considering the seismic industry collapse in 1999 and the severe cuts in seismic industry research and engineering following a cumulative minus $2 billion free…
Recent advances in marine seismic acquisition and processing technology
Thorbjørn Rekdal and Andrew Long
We review the developments in marine seismic technology over the past five years, and then use recent innovations to predict the next five years. Overall, most oil companies are beginning to embrace better acquisition planning as being a necessary foundation to overcome long-standing challenges to better seismic data. In particular,…
Reflections on the Deconvolution of Land Seismic Data
Peter Cary
Convolution is the process by which a wavelet combines with a series of reflection events to produce the seismogram that is recorded in a seismic survey. The familiar model is that a seismogram, s(t), is the wavelet, w(t), convolved with the reflectivity, r(t), and noise, n(t): s(t) = w(t) *…
Wavelet estimation by non-linear optimization of all-pass operators
Somanath Misra and Mauricio Sacchi
A mixed phase wavelet can be parameterized as a convolution of a minimum phase wavelet and an all-pass wavelet. The minimum phase wavelet can be estimated from the data by the Wiener-Levinson algorithm. The technique of cumulant matching is used to estimate the phase of the all-pass wavelet. Higher order…
Developments in seismic anisotropy: Treating realistic subsurface models in imaging and fracture detection
Ilya Tsvankin and Vladimir Grechka
The scope of recent advances in the field of seismic anisotropy is too wide to be thoroughly analyzed in a short overview article. Here, our goal is to emphasize several key recent developments and trends and give a limited number of essential references.
... Towards wave-equation imaging and velocity estimation
Samuel Gray, Daniel Trad, Biondo Biondi, Larry Lines
Prestack depth migration (PSDM) has gained widespread acceptance as a tool of choice for seismic imaging in geologically complex areas. Its ability to honor lateral velocity variations gives geophysicists greater confidence in the precise location of their drilling targets on their image than they can possibly have using prestack time…
Regularized migration/inversion: New Generation of Seismic Imaging Algorithms
Mauricio Sacchi, Juefu Wang, and Henning Kuehl
... Significant developments in multicomponent seismic exploration in the last five years and future directions: Recent developments in converted PS-wave analysis processing of shear S-wave splitting and prestack migration
James Gaiser and Tony Probert
There have been tremendous advancements in 3D multicomponent seismic acquisition, processing, analysis and interpretation over the past five years. Improvements have been made in PS-wave (converted-wave) signal processing, including velocity analyses and anisotropy, interpretation and event registration of PP and PS data, and prestack imaging. Both PS-waves and P-waves (compressional…
Advances in Land Multicomponent Seismic: Acquisition, Processing and Interpretation
Coordinated by Robert Kendall
Land multicomponent seismic has garnered significant attention and demonstrated substantial growth in the last five years. The bulk of this growth in multicomponent activity has been in western Canada. While multicomponent seismic has been around for many years, historical cost and quality concerns have limited its use as a routine…
Delineating a sand channel using 3C-3D seismic data: Ross Lake heavy oilfield, Saskatchewan
Chuandong (Richard) Xu and Robert Stewart
The Ross Lake oilfield, operated by Husky Energy Inc., is located in south-western Saskatchewan, Canada. The reservoir is at about 1150m depth and is interpreted as a lower- Cretaceous, incised-valley channel sand in the Dimmock Creek member of the Cantuar formation of the Mannville Group. The sand has high porosity…
Practical applications of P-wave AVO for unconventional gas Resource Plays – I: Seismic petrophysics
Bill Goodway, John Varsek and Christian Abaco
For the past few years natural gas exploration in North America has focused on the huge resource potential of unconventional reservoirs such as coalbed methane (CBM), tight gas sands and shales. These gas accumulations, termed Resource Plays at EnCana, are low permeability-porosity reservoirs, with gas stored in natural fractures or…
An Inversion Primer
Brian Russell, Dan Hampson, Bradley Bankhead
Seismic inversion is a technique that has been in use by geophysicists for almost forty years. Early inversion techniques transformed the seismic data into P-impedance (the product of density and P-wave velocity), from which we were able to make predictions about lithology and porosity. However, these predictions were somewhat ambiguous…
The New Reservoir Characterization
John Pendrel
When the author arrived at Gulf Science and Technology Company in Pittsburgh, PA, in 1977, post-stack seismic inversion to acoustic impedance had been in common use there for about two years. The algorithm was a simple one – every seismic sample was assumed to represent a reflection coefficient. Phase was…
Seismic Attributes – a promising aid for geologic prediction
Satinder Chopra and Kurt Marfurt
Seismic attributes have come a long way since their introduction in the early 1970s and have become an integral part of seismic interpretation projects. Today, they are being used widely for lithological and petrophysical prediction of reservoirs and various methodologies have been developed for their application to broader hydrocarbon exploration…
Recent Advances in Rock Physics and Fluid Substitution
Tapan Mukerji and Gary Mavko
One of the most important developments in rock physics has been progress toward quantifying the relations between geologic processes and geophysical signatures. Historically, the majority of rock physics research was done by physicists. Their theoretical models – some very useful – described the effective properties of the rock as a…
Future challenges and unexplored methods for 4D seismic analysis
Martin Landrø
The two major challenges that 4D seismic analysis will face in the next decade is to make it work for carbonate reservoirs and to extract production related information from 4D data sets where the signal to noise ratio is low. In order to meet these challenges we have to test…
A personal perspective on the past, present and future of Time Lapse seismic monitoring
Keith Hirsche
As I write this article, I am sitting on another airplane crossing the Atlantic, and I wonder why I promised Satinder that I would write an article about Time Lapse seismic monitoring for the RECORDER. On the other hand, it would have been very difficult to refuse since there are…
Rock Physics Strategies for Facies and Fluids Mapping
Gary Mavko
Over the last decades enormous strides have been made to understand the relations between the physical properties of reservoir rocks and their geophysical signatures — the science now known as Rock Physics. We have gradually discovered more and more order in relations that once appeared disappointingly scattered, for example, velocity…
