Forward Modeling of Marine Csem Data Using an Integral Equation with T-Matrix and Extended Born Approximations

Abstract

Summary One of the Electromagnetic induction (EMI) techniques for submarine hydrocarbon reservoirs is the controlled-source electromagnetic (CSEM) method. Despite the fact that the marine CSEM method is less accurate than seismic reflection measurements, it has reduced the cost of modeling and has a relatively high coverage speed. In this research, for 3D forward modeling of a hydrocarbon reservoir with regular and irregular geometrical shape, integral equation (IE) methods are used. As for solving full integral equations high-performance computers are needed and these computational costs are not affordable, some effective approximations are usually used to solve the electromagnetic problems. The present study aims are applying and comparing several approximation methods to solve integral equations for 3D CSEM synthetic data in order to avoid solving full integral equations. These approximation methods consist of T-matrix approximation (TMA), Extended Born approximation (EBA), and Born approximation (BA). To numerically verify the performance of the proposed approximations, the methods are tested on 3D forward modeling of two synthetic models in MATLAB software. Our results show that the T-Matrix approximation has better accuracy and a wider electrical conductivity application range in comparison with EBA and BA.