Technical Content

Seismic inversion transforms seismic reflection data into quantitative rock-property descriptions of a reservoir. Seismic data bandwidth is limited by signal-to-noise ratio, absorption, source wavelet, and shot and receiver ghosts. A typical deterministic seismic inversion workflow fills the low frequencies by extrapolating or interpolating existing ...

Least-squares migration (LSM) can potentially provide better amplitude fidelity, higher image resolution, and fewer migration artifacts than standard migration. Conventional LSM is often solved iteratively through linearized inversion, and therefore is often referred to as iterative LSM. In recent years, various single-iteration LSM approaches ...

The oil-bearing fractured granite basement rocks form a very important and complicated hydrocarbon reservoir in Cuu Long basin offshore Vietnam. However, the poor fractured basement imaging in the conventional tow streamer data makes it hard for detailed interpretation and future well placement. To improve ...

DALLAS–The great land grab in the Midland Basin has resulted in an exponential increase in acreage prices, with buyers paying up to $60,000 an acre in some cases. In this competitive environment, oil and gas companies–particularly smaller independents–are starting to look for prospective areas ...

Deblending shallow water OBC data can be challenging. High blending fold, strong early arrivals, shear wave energy, and background noise all add to the complexity of the problem. Using an offshore Trinidad OBC survey, including dual and triple sources, we demonstrate the effectiveness of ...

The Wolfcamp reservoir of the Permian Basin has recently generated interest for its potentially vast oil and gas reserves. Imaging this reservoir using seismic data is challenging despite the uncomplicated geology at reservoir depth, because the near-surface in this region is complex. In this ...

Complex overburdens often distort reservoir images in terms of structural positioning, stratigraphic resolution, and amplitude fidelity. One prime example of a complex overburden is in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, where thick and irregular layers of remobilized (i.e., allochthonous) salt are situated above prospective ...

This study is based on work performed on horizontal wells in the Cleveland Sandstone Formation. Previous work describes the technique of using automated, quantitative mineralogy (RoqScan) to analyse drill cuttings and derive rock property and elastic pseudo-logs to customize completion designs. We expand on ...

Deterministic seismic inversion methods have been successfully used in many exploration and production projects in the petroleum industry. Some of the benefits of these methods are: the inverted impedances are rock properties tightly calibrated with well data; the seismic inversion process itself attenuates the ...