Techniques applied to obtain very high resolution 3-D seismic imaging at an Athabasca tar sands thermal pilot

Pullin, Norman E.; Matthews, Larry; Hirsche, W. Keith

doi:10.1190/1.1439353

Cited by 32 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Early case studies (Greaves and Fulp, 1987;Pullin et al, 1987 et al, 1992;Lumley, 1995;Eastwood et al, 1996) describe the seismic monitoring of fields undergoing thermally enhanced recovery processes such as steam flood or fireflood. Laboratory experiments (Wang and Nur, 1989) have shown temperature changes in reservoir conditions may induce extremely large velocity changes of up to 40%.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross‐equalization data processing for time‐lapse seismic reservoir monitoring: A case study from the Gulf of Mexico

2001

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Nonrepeatable noise, caused by differences in vintages of seismic acquisition and processing, can often make comparison and interpretation of time-lapse 3-D seismic data sets for reservoir monitoring misleading or futile. In this Gulf of Mexico case study, the major causes of nonrepeatable noise in the data sets are the result of differences in survey acquisition geometry and binning, temporal and spatial amplitude gain, wavelet bandwidth and phase, differential static time shifts, and relative mispositioning of imaged reflection events. We attenuate these acquisition and processing differences by developing and applying a cross-equalization data processing flow for time-lapse seismic data. The cross-equalization flow consists of regridding the two data sets to a common grid; applying a space and time-variant amplitude envelope balance; applying a first pass of matched filter corrections for global amplitude, bandwidth, phase and static shift corrections, followed by a dynamic warp to align mispositioned events; and, finally, running a second pass of constrained space-variant matched filter operators. Difference sections obtained by subtracting the two data sets after each step of the cross-equalization processing flow show a progressive reduction of nonrepeatable noise and a simultaneous improvement in timelapse reservoir signal.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross‐equalization data processing for time‐lapse seismic reservoir monitoring: A case study from the Gulf of Mexico

2001

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“…A pioneering seismic monitoring experiment was conducted from 1985 to 1987 at the Gregoire Lake In Situ Steam Pilot (GLISP) in northeastern Alberta, approximately 40 km south of Fort McMurray (Pullin et al, 1986;Pullin et al, 1987 a, b), which demonstrated the use of high-resolution 3D seismic for delineating steam fronts in oil sands. At the time this site was selected by Amoco Canada along with partners Alberta Oil Sands Technology Research Authority (AOSTRA) and PetroCanada, the first well drilled, H-3, had indicated the presence of a 50-m thick, relatively homogeneous McMurray formation, having approximately 30% porosity and 85% oil saturation (Hirsche et al, 2002).…”

Section: Steam Flood Monitoringmentioning

confidence: 99%

1. Heavy-Oil Reservoirs: Their Characterization and Production

Chopra¹,

Lines²,

Schmitt³

et al. 2010

Heavy Oils

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“…With regards to thermal enhanced recovery, some of the pioneering time lapse survey work was carried out in the mid 1980's in the Athabasca oil sands [e.g., Pullin, et al, 1987], at Cold Lake [Macrides, et al, 1988;Siewert, 1994] and Provost [Bregman, et al, 1989]. Larger projects were carried out in the deeper Cold Lake deposits in the early 1990's [Kalantzis, et al, 1993;Eastwood, et al, 1994;Kalantzis, et al, 1996;Kalantzis, et al, 2003;Isaac and Lawton, 2006], in shallow [Paulsson, et al, 1994;Schmitt, 1999] and deep [Zhang, et al, 2007] Athabasca deposits, and in Lloydminster style reservoirs [Li, et al, 2001;Schmitt and Zhang, 2004].…”

Section: New Brunswick Seismic Examplementioning

confidence: 99%