Estimation of PP‐ wave ray impedance from elastic impedance

Abstract

Theoretical evaluation of elastic impedance (EI) and ray impedance (RI) reveals that RI has a more reliable dimension and is less sensitive to errors than EI. In this paper, a new measurement (I) is proposed to estimate ray impedance from the elastic impedance derived by existing techniques. The recovered I is expressed in the form of a normalization of the elastic impedance (EI), and it has the same dimension and interpretation capability as RI. Tests of these three measurements are performed on the log data of three different types of reservoir: a typical Class III marine gas sand, a Class I tight gas‐sand and an oil‐bearing sand in thin sand‐mud inter‐bedded layers. We show that RI is capable of characterizing all three types of reservoir. In particular, it appears to be more applicable than EI for characterizing tight gas sands. The cross‐plots of EI against acoustic impedance (AI) show good characterization for gas sand, but approximately linear trends are found for all three cases. I, estimated from EI, has a comparable dimension to the acoustic impedance (AI), and retains the interpretation ability of the original RI.