Integrated interpretation of gravity, magnetic, seismic, and well data to image volcanic units for oil-gas exploration in the eastern Junggar Basin, northwest China

Abstract

We carried out a multigeophysical data joint interpretation to image volcanic units in an area where seismic imaging is difficult due to complicated and variable volcanic lithology. The gravity and magnetic methods can be effective in imaging the volcanic units because volcanic rocks are often strongly magnetic and have large density contrasts. Gravity and magnetic data have good lateral resolution, but they are faced with challenges in defining the depth extent. Although seismic data make for poor imaging in volcanic rocks, they can provide a reliable stratigraphic structure above volcanic rocks to improve the vertical resolution of the gravity and magnetic method. We have developed an integrated interpretation method that combines the advantages of seismic, gravity, magnetic, and well data to generate a 3D quasigeology model to image volcanic units. We first use seismic data to obtain the stratigraphic boundaries, and then we apply an anomaly stripping method based on a seismic-derived structure to extract residual gravity and magnetic anomaly produced by volcanic rocks. We further perform the 3D gravity and magnetic amplitude inversion to recover the distribution of the density and effective susceptibility. We perform geology differentiation using the inverted density and effective magnetic susceptibility to identify the spatial distribution of four groups of volcanic units. The results show that the integrated interpretation of multigeophysical data can significantly decrease the uncertainty associated with any single data set and yield more reliable imaging of lateral and vertical distribution of volcanic rocks.