Seismic Prediction of Reservoir Parameters

Abstract

In seismic analysis, our goal is to determine the properties of the subsurface of the earth using seismic measurements made on the surface of the earth. Seismic measurements are made by sending elastic waves into the earth (by setting off an artificial explosion at the earth’s surface) and recording the reflected elastic waves at the earth’s surface (using geophones on land and hydrophones offshore). Although this technique has been practiced since the beginning of the twentieth century, the major advances in seismic analysis have occurred during the last fifty years, and were spurred by the joint development of digital recording and the digital computer. Most of the techniques that have been developed for the analysis of seismic data can be classified as deterministic. That is, we develop a deterministic physical model which relates the material properties of the subsurface of the earth to the physics of the transmitted and reflected seismic waves.

More recently, researchers have started using a statistical, rather than deterministic, approach to the determination of the earth’s subsurface and its reservoir parameters. That is one of the main approaches that we will use here. Thus, instead of assuming an underlying model, we will use multivariate statistical techniques to determine the earth’s subsurface, using a set of derived “attributes” from the seismic data.