Articles
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…
Talisman Energy Inc. in New York State
Timo Von Rudloff
In 2000 Talisman Energy Inc. began a project to drill and produce gas in the northern Appalachian Basin of the United States. In particular, it evaluated and entered into operations in the states of New York and Pennsylvania, with ongoing consideration given to the neighbouring states, like Ohio and West…
My Life in the Trenches
Doug Pruden
In 1999, while oil prices were crashing, the company for which I worked encountered some financial difficulties and was forced to sell (at a significantly discounted share price!). Being 41 years old and forced to make an unplanned career move, I found myself pondering the eternal midlife question, “What do…
Glimmer of Sunshine in the Field
Mike Doyle
Maybe there is a glimmer of sunshine in the business of seismic this year. This year marks the first in many where programs simply did not get shot. It marked a slight realization by seismic contractors that they may be able to do something on some of their risk clauses.…
Too many seismic attributes?
Arthur Barnes
Are there too many seismic attributes? Their great number and variety is almost overwhelming. How can one decide which ones to use? But it is not as bad as it looks. Throw away all the unnecessary attributes and what is left over is quite manageable.
... Outreach Committee Launches Ambassadors Program
Doug Uffen
Formed three (3) years ago, the CSEG Outreach Committee is charged with promoting the science of geophysics on behalf of the society. The role of the Outreach Committee is essentially one of communication. While the CSEG officially stands for the Canadian Society of Exploration Geophysicists, the society has functioned essentially…
Structural Setting and Petroleum Potential of the Orphan Basin, offshore Newfoundland and Labrador
Michael Enachescu
The Orphan Basin region, situated north of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland has undergone repeated extensional episodes. Crustal stretching of the mainly Paleozoic platform started in Late Triassic to Early Jurassic. Subsequent extensional episodes lasting until the Paleocene deepened the basin and enlarged it, by westward (landward) propagation of rifting.…
ARAM from the road
Gary James
Near the end of the last century (around 1990), Geo-X completed a 10 year run as a seismic contractor. Some of you with long memories may remember the Geocor IV crews that used to rumble over the western plains recording Vibroseis data. As part of the experience of trying to…
Some thoughts on working in the exploration services field outside of Canada
Bill Quirk
When I was asked to script a few lines on my perspective of the International Exploration Environment (IEE, everyone has an initialism or acronym so I thought I would create my own initialism for this text), I had to reflect back to the time when I accepted my first foreign…
Predicting lithology and porosity at the Pikes Peak heavy oilfield, Saskatchewan using 3C seismic data and well logs
Natalia Soubotcheva and Robert Stewart
The Pikes Peak oil field is located 40 km east of Lloydminster, Saskatchewan and produces heavy oil (12*API) from the Waseca sands of the Lower Cretaceous Mannville Group. Hulten (1984) provided a comprehensive geologic description for the Waseca formation in and around the Pikes Peak field. Over 42 million barrels…
The Petroleum Geoscience Vision of the University of Calgary
Helen Isaac
In December 2005, Larry Lines (Head of the Geology and Geophysics department at the University of Calgary) and Ron Burke (Director of Development in the Faculty of Science, UofC) met some CSEG representatives to present the department’s new Petroleum Geoscience Vision. In attendance for the CSEG were Oliver Kuhn (VP),…
