SEG Development and Production Luncheon

A Step Change in Obtaining Reservoir Properties from Seismic Data

Thursday, 31 August
11:30 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
George R. Brown Convention Center, Level 3, Room 320

Exploration decisions require rock and fluid properties to be as accurate as possible. Production assets and reservoir engineers require fluid and pressure changes for field development and reserves calculations. It is the geophysicist’s responsibility to provide these properties as quantitatively as possible to the stakeholders. In this presentation, it will be shown that the accuracy of estimating these parameters from seismic data is best when PP and PS prestack data are used jointly, followed by PP prestack data alone, followed by PP poststack data. Modern acquisition (ocean-bottom cable/ocean-bottom node/fiber distributed acoustic sensing) and processing (such as full-waveform inversion) on land and offshore data make the AVO parameter estimation quantitatively more accurate and realizable. Comparison of AVO parameter estimation, and thereby fluid and pressure properties, using these three different data inputs shows how accuracy of our estimates can be improved. In this presentation, this is first explained theoretically and then demonstrated on synthetic data with incrementally adding noise. Next, a 3D field data set on land and two 4D field data sets offshore are used to demonstrate the improvement in accuracy of quantitative reservoir property estimation for exploration and production projects.

Fee: $70

Ali Tura is Professor of Geophysics at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) with over 30 years of industry experience prior to academia. Dr. Tura was Geophysical Senior Fellow at ConocoPhillips, Geophysical Advisor at Chevron, and 4D subject matter expert at Shell. Dr. Tura is currently Chief Scientist at Tulip Geosciences and co-director of the industry consortium Reservoir Characterization Project (RCP) at CSM. Dr. Tura’s expertise is in CCUS, time-lapse, reservoir characterization and monitoring, fiber optics, machine learning, and compressive sensing. He was SEG Distinguished Lecturer in 2021 and received the Best Paper Award at SEG-IMAGE in 2021.
Ali Tura, Professor of Geophysics, Colorado School of Mines