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The AAPG/Datapages Combined Publications Database
Houston Geological Society Bulletin
Abstract
Abstract: What’s New in
Seismic
Imaging?
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From a geophysicist’s perspective, the better the seismic
image,
the easier it is for the geologists to do their job. So in a sense,
we are working hard to trivialize you! Of
course in the hydrocarbon exploration and
production business we’re collectively always
working on the frontiers: geologically,
geographically, technically, scientifically, etc.
So our ability to image and interpret things
we want to under s tand i s cons tant ly
challenged. Do recent geophysical trends have
the potential to revolutionize the relationship
between geophysical data and geological
understanding and interpretation of the
interior of the Earth? Maybe. I’ll talk about
these trends, which are the product of the
incredible advances in computing power
available for processing
seismic
data
combined with clever thinking about how we
collect
seismic
data.
For a variety of reasons, the deepwater region of the Gulf of
Mexico is one of our favorite proving grounds for geophysical
technologies. There, industry faces many technical challenges
around developing subsalt reservoirs. A few years ago BP
pioneered two new seismic
acquisition methods that when
coupled with advances in
seismic
processing have made substantial
improvements in our understanding of these reservoirs. I’ll show
you some examples of these methods applied to BP assets. One
of the keys to motivating these advances was the use of
seismic
forward
modeling
. The ability to simulate realistic synthetic data
and test hypotheses has become a critical part of geophysical
science. We have even come to the point now where the same
technology used to simulate data to the best of our ability is being
used to process the data we actually acquire in the field. The
future holds not only more clever ways of acquiring data, but
ways of acquiring a lot more data.
If you hang around geophysicists enough, you’re certain to hear
them discuss “seismic
velocities”. We need good estimates of the
speed that waves propagate in the subsurface to apply our imaging
methods. We take great pains to do this quickly and accurately.
However, many of the methods we used in the past are based on
substantial simplifications to the way waves
propagate. Recently, a method called
“Waveform Inversion” has been gathering a
lot of excitement. Historically the velocity
“models” that geophysicists have created were
lacking in information content at intermediate
scales. We could find sharp changes in velocity,
because they give rise to reflection events.
We could find very long wavelength trends in
the speed of wave propagation through traveltime
tomography. Variations in wave speed
that were tens to a few hundred meters
in scale were not recovered. When we can
recover features with velocity expressions
at those scales, the results are dramatic in
terms of connecting geology to geophysics. I’ll
show some examples of this technology and explore its potential
for the future.
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