Advanced Processing of Multiples into useful Seismic data for Surface Hydrocarbon Oilfields

Abstract

Distinguishing multiples from primaries and transforming them into useful signals has been one of the most serious difficulties faced by Geophysicists when processing and interpreting data. Multiples are multiplicative events seen in seismic sections which often seriously impedes correct mapping of the subsurface geology in search of oil and gas reservoirs. These events have undergone more than one reflection. In this paper, we present an approach to transform shot gathers from multiple reflections into primaries by combining a multi-channel weighted cross-correlation (WCC) with surface-related multiple elimination (SRME). The new primaries obtained from the combination exhibit the same kinematics as the original dataset with few transformation artefacts. We also demonstrate that this primaries can accurately estimate missing traces as long as the gaps are within the acquisition spread.While this combination allows the transformation of multiples into primaries for surface seismic data, the latter means that nonlinear seismic imaging can be implemented by a number of linear steps. The result shows that the multiple reflections contain a wealth of information that should be used in seismic processing to improve the resolution of reservoir images beyond current capability.