Articles

The Changing Face of The Canadian Oilpatch

Wilf Gobert

During the 1980s and 1990s, the duration of bull markets in energy equities (an uptrend in the energy index of 25% or more) lasted 18 to 20 months on average before world oil price volatility caused a bear market, which typically lasted 12 to 14 months. The current bull market…

Petroleum Pride

Eve S. Sprunt

The petroleum industry has a serious image problem both with the general public and with employees. Many of those working in the oil patch are less than complementary when they talk about their employers. For the last two decades the number of people in the industry has been shrinking. Today’s…

A Brief History of Canada’s Natural Gas Production

Dave Russum

Natural gas has been the primary driver in Alberta’s growth over the past fifteen years. The graph shows the trend in Canadian marketed gas production (Bcf/d) since 1947 (CAPP Data). The red area shows the gas production from the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin (WCSB) while gas production from Eastern Canada…

Implementation of a State-of-the-Art Monitoring system on Turtle Mountain

On April 29th, 2003, during the Centennial remembrance ceremony for the disastrous Frank Slide, Premier Ralph Klein announced that the Province of Alberta would commit to implementing a state-of-the-art monitoring system for Turtle Mountain at a cost of $1 million dollars. AGS is providing geological technical expertise towards implementing this…

Mackenzie Delta: Fresh Look at an Emerging Basin

Christopher L. Bergquist, Peter P. Graham, and Dennis H. Johnston

Focus Intro: Environmental geophysics

Helen Isaac

Environmental geophysics, like mining geophysics, is thought of, by some myopic Calgarians, as a poor relation of petroleum geophysics. However, much interesting and highly relevant work is being done in this field. Important issues such as the detection of contaminated sites for remedial clean-up of hazardous waste materials, determination of…

Adventures with GPR experiments through ice

Helen Isaac and Greg MacCulloch

Three ground-penetrating radar (GPR) surveys were conducted across frozen lakes to investigate the practicality of the method for determining the depths of lakes for Environment Canada. Traverses acquired at Lake Louise with 25 MHz, 100 MHz and 200 MHz antennae imaged the bottom of the lake very well to about…

Mapping groundwater in regolith and fractured bedrock using ground geophysics: A case study from Mal

Richard Kellett and Paul Bauman

Water supply in rural regions of southern Africa is complicated by the highly irregular nature of aquifers in weathered crystalline bedrock. Drilling success can be as low as 30%. Improvements in the success rate can be achieved by using simple geophysical investigations to target the thickest zones of weathering. More…

Multi-method geophysical prospecting of the Moviola lui Deciov archaeological site, Romania

J.M. Maillol

An archaeological geophysics survey was conducted on the Early Neolithic site of Moviola lui Deciov, in the Province of Banat, Romania. Magnetometry was used for the main prospection effort and a test of electrical resistivity imaging was conducted on a selected profile. In addition, magnetic susceptibility measurements were obtained from…

AVO Modeling in Seismic Processing and Interpretation Part III. Applications

Yongyi Li, Jonathan Downton, and Yong Xu

AVO modeling plays an active role in three areas: new technology development, QC data processing, and assisting data interpretation. This paper attempts to discuss these issues, with emphasis on the applications of AVO modeling in data processing and interpretation. Data modeling is introduced for its theoretical background and its applications…

AVO analysis in the presence of NMO stretch and offset dependent tuning

Jonathan Downton

The effects of NMO stretch and offset dependent tuning on the estimates of AVO inversion and analysis may be quantified by an analytic expression. This expression shows that these effects primarily distort the AVO gradient while essentially leaving the intercept unbiased. The influence of these distortions is largely controlled by…

Seismic Exploration off Canada’s East Coast

Doug Bogstie and Andy Dyke

In December of 1901 Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first transatlantic signal from Cornwall, England to St. John’s Newfoundland. The signal was received at a site that has come to be known as Signal Hill, from where you can overlook both the North Atlantic and North America’s oldest city, St. John’s…

Understanding a Doodlebugger

Brian Schulte

When I started to study Geology at the University of Calgary I never realized that my career would take me to some of the more interesting points in the world. I remember sitting in my Sedimentary class wondering why I was studying the Mississippi Delta or why we were learning…

Optimal marine streamer acquisition with High-Density 3D

Andrew Long, Bill Pramik and Marie Dunn

Our goal with the reflection seismic experiment is to obtain the most clearly defined, high-resolution image of the subsurface geology, free of contaminating noise. This goal can be achieved by acquiring seismic surveys with dense and even sampling in both time and space. Historically though, 3D marine streamer acquisition has…

AVO Modeling in Seismic Processing and Interpretation II. Methodologies

Yongyi Li, Jonathan Downton, and Yong Xu

Zoeppritz’s equations with ray tracing and full elastic wave equation with finite difference method (FDM) are two most commonly used techniques in AVO modeling. The main difference between these two techniques is the former calculates the primary-only reflectivities and the latter calculates particle displacements in subsurface. Zoeppritz modeling has the…

Gabor Deconvolution: extending Wiener’s method to nonstationarity

Gary Margrave, Linping Dong, Peter Gibson, Jeff Grossman, Dave Henley, and Michael Lamoureux

Seismic data is arguably always nonstationary in its Fourier spectral character since anelastic attenuation processes are present everywhere. The major mathematical tool for dealing with this effect in seismic data processing is the Wiener deconvolution algorithm, which is at least a half century old. Paradoxically, this algorithm assumes that the…

The bleeding edge of seismic imaging, 2003

Samuel H. Gray

Earlier this year, James Sun and I gave a CSEG Luncheon presentation describing the current state of the art of seismic depth migration, as it applies to Canadian basins. Our overview was aimed at bridging the gap between depth migration and velocity analysis methods routinely applied today, and newer methods…

2004 Election of Officers Candidates

Overview of 2004 CSEG election candidates.

Some Issues related to Seismic Imaging in Deep-Water Basins

Mike Hall

Obtaining high fidelity seismic images in deep water basins has several challenges. These run from the issues of dealing with noise to building accurate interval velocity models for Pre-Stack Depth Migration (PreSDM). Exploration, and development, in such basins is commonly associated with deep targets that may well be associated with…

AVO Modeling in Seismic Processing and Interpretation Part 1. Fundamentals

Yongyi Li, Jonathan Downton, and Yong Xu

AVO analysis is an effective technique in reservoir characterization and its success relies on not only the quality of recorded seismic data but also data processing and understanding of rock physical properties. Since AVO modeling is able to link rock properties to offset-dependent amplitude responses, it is a tool in…