Grapevine

…T-WAVE: Registration Information It’s just about time to register for the 6th Annual T-Wave Golf Tourney held this year on August 13th, 2014 at the Inglewood Golf and Curling Club. Registration forms are available on the CSEG website at www.cseg.ca beginning May 1, 2014. Remember this is a fun tourney…

Seismic Imaging in the Presence of Strong Contrasts – How forgetful are seismic waves?

Bernd Milkereit

…Seismic imaging is an important geophysical tool for delineating and monitoring the earth’s subsurface structure and its oil, gas and mineral resources. Owing to the earth’s heterogeneity, such subsurface structures exist at different scales (sizes) with lateral and vertical variations in physical properties such as contrasts in bulk and shear…

Introduction to March Focus: Anisotropy: 5D Interpolation

Mike Perz

…Out of all the innovation to take place over the past 20 years in land processing, I believe that 5D interpolation has emerged as the single most important algorithm. Whether or not you agree with me, you cannot deny the importance of 5D interpolation (or “5D” for short) in today’s…

Five-dimensional interpolation: New directions and challenges

Daniel Trad

…Five-dimensional (5D) interpolation has been in the industry for almost ten years now, and has become widely accepted and used. There are now a variety of implementations, with different algorithms and flavors. Our understanding of interpolation has grown greatly in the last decade because of its use in increasingly challenging…

Real vs. ‘5D’ Data: An analysis of acquired vs. interpolated data in both the post-stack and the pre-stack domains for parallel and orthogonal geometries

Emily Duncan, Ann O’Byrne and Jillian Dalsin

…Introduction Cenovus conducted an acquisition experiment that tested various geometries and parameters in late fall, 2011. A very dense seismic survey (10 sections/26 km2) was designed and acquired that allowed for several less dense sub-surveys to be decimated from the original. The sub-surveys’ geometry types were parallel and orthogonal, and…

No magic from 5D interpolation on a coarse 3D oilsands dataset – a case history

Sylvestre Charles, Jim Hostetler, Jiwu Lin, Xiaoming Luo, Kevin Roberts

…This case history is based on a coarse 3D seismic dataset that was acquired for a commercial Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) project in the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta. In conjunction with a dense core-hole drilling program, this legacy 3D seismic dataset was acquired to better understand the geological…

Can interpolation improve QI?

Laurie M. Weston Bellman

…It seems too good to be true – creating seismic data in processing at a fraction of the cost of actually recording it. Nevertheless, the practice of seismic interpolation has been an increasingly popular trend in recent years with the latest 5D algorithms becoming an integral piece of the pre-stack…

Barrie Jose

An Interview with Barrie Jose

…Could you tell us about your educational background and your work experience? I did my B.Sc. (Honours) in Geological Sciences with Physics at Queens University from 1973-1977. That was the name Queens gave their geophysics program at the time. It was a full geology degree, the same as any other,…

Presidential Column

…Greetings. I believe this is my last column as CSEG president. I will spend some time in the usual way: expressing thanks. There is much to say in that regard, and it must start with the CSEG’s staff. Jim and Sheryl are a complete treasure to the various communities within…

Executive Message

…As my first year of duties on the CSEG Executive as Assistant Director of Education winds to a close, I will echo what I have heard and read from other Executives in the past… it has been busy. At first blush, I have to plead ignorance to the scope of…

CAGC Column

…In December 2013 I attended an evening at the Bon Mot Book Club in Calgary featuring author George Friedman and his book The Next 100 Years. I think it is safe to say the farther out you try to predict, the more likely you are wrong; however the author’s structure…

Value of Integrated Geophysics

…When Geophysics is a Second Language Recently, it has been my privilege to help with English as a Second Language classes. This is one situation where it is quickly apparent that the most valuable person in the room is the one who can communicate in more than one language. It…

Tracing the Industry

…ON THE MOVE... GEOSEIS Inc. continues to gradually expand and diversify its team of capable professionals to support initiatives and growth in the GIS and Data Analytics areas to support prospectivity analysis, data integration and asset management. New staff include Ye Xu (Senior Exploration Geologist), Vera Gree (GIS Spatial Analytics…

Grapevine

…47th Annual Family Ski Spree The Ski Spree was held the weekend of February 21st in beautiful Fairmont B.C. This sold-out event saw more than 350 participants enjoy family events and skiing at Fairmont Hot Springs Resort. The event had a full gamut of companies that stepped up with valuable…

A Journey Through Time In Search of Arabian Giants – Oil/Gas Fields, Recording Channels, and Petabytes

Peter I. Pecholcs

…This journey began 22 years ago when I first arrived in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, the land of giant oil and gas fields. It was at a time when the search began for new giants outside the Eastern Province (Retained Area 1), which is home to the world’s largest oil field…

Introduction to February Focus: Anisotropy: Fractures and Faults

Rob Kendall

…Welcome to this special issue of the RECORDER that presents five papers on fractures and anisotropy. While this theme has been in and out of the spotlight for many years, we are seeing novel approaches for extracting even more information from the data than we were a mere five years…

On Hookean solids in seismology: anisotropy and fractures

Michael A. Slawinski

…1. INTRODUCTION Geophysics—similarly to astrophysics—relies on remote sensing. Inferring material properties of the Earth’s interior is akin to inferring the composition of a distant star. In both cases, scientists rely on matching theoretical predictions or explanations with observations. Notably, obtaining a sample of a material from the interior of our…

Results from diverse fracture analysis methodologies: consistent, contradictory, or complementary?

M. Perz, P. Cary, X. Li, S. Chopra, and L. Hunt

…We examine four independent approaches to fracture detection using surface-seismic data. Fundamental algorithmic properties and limitations are studied in an attempt to explain observed differences between the attributes generated from the various approaches. Real data examples are presented, including one which demonstrates simultaneous analysis of all four techniques and which…

Case study: 3C and 9C prestack shear wave splitting analysis at Big Sky

Jeff P. Grossman and Gulia Popov

…We present a tutorial style case study in which we compare two approaches to shear wave splitting (SWS) analysis and layer stripping on a subset of 3-D 9-C data from Montana. The first, and perhaps more familiar method, utilizes converted wave, or PS data, while the second utilizes pure shear…

Anisotropic moment tensor inversion and visualization applied to a dual well monitoring survey

S. Leaney, X. Yu, C. Chapman, L. Bennett, S. Maxwell, J. Rutledge and J. Duhault

…In this paper we review the workflow used for anisotropic moment tensor inversion and visualization applied to a dual well monitoring survey from the West Pembina field in Alberta. The workflow makes use of an exact, dynamic, layered VTI ray-tracer that allows for constant dip. Included are a description of…