Hydrocarbon identification by application of improved sparse constrained inverse spectral decomposition to frequency-dependent AVO inversion

Abstract

Spectral decomposition based on sparse constrained inversion, as proposed in recent years, is a high-resolution time-frequency domain analysis method. However, the traditional inverse spectral decomposition (ISD) algorithm is based on an inverse wavelet transform (IWT) whose mother wavelet is a Ricker wavelet function instead of an adaptive wavelet, which causes poor continuity and instability of the ISD results. In this paper, we have extended ISD into other linear transforms and have developed an ISD based on inverse S transform (ISD-IST), which has higher continuity and stability due to the more adjustable and adaptable mother wavelet of the S transform. Comparison of conventional methods and the ISD-IST shows that the ISD (ISD-IWT and ISD-IST) methods have higher resolution and accuracy and can provide more reliable time-frequency phase spectra, and it further verifies the greater continuity and stability of ISD-IST over ISD-IWT. Frequency-dependent AVO (FAVO) inversion is regarded as a potential hydrocarbon identification technique (Wilson et al 2009 SEG Technical Program Expanded Abstracts pp 341–5). However, it is frequency-decomposition based, which means that inversion results can be greatly affected by the effect of time-frequency analysis (Wu et al 2010 SEG Technical Program Expanded Abstracts pp 425–9; Wu et al 2014 Geophys. Prospect. 62 1224–37). Combining the FAVO inversion and high-resolution time-frequency decomposition ISD allows better dispersion attributes to be obtained. Results from application in Southwest China demonstrate that the high frequency-resolution of ISD is helpful in the extraction of gas-induced frequency anomalies from post-stack data, and its high time-resolution helps to obtain high time-resolution gas-induced dispersion results from FAVO inversion. The results of FAVO-ISD not only agree better with well information, but also supply more credible boundary information for the reservoirs. ISD-IST can provide more continuous results and smoother boundary information for the gas reservoir than ISD-IWT.