McMC-based AVAZ direct inversion for fracture weaknesses

Abstract

Considering that wide-azimuth seismic data contains abundant azimuthal amplitude information about the fractured reservoir with obvious characteristics of amplitude variation with incident angle and azimuth (AVAZ), azimuthal seismic data can be used for the inversion of anisotropic parameters in fractured reservoir. Fractured reservoir with a single set of vertically aligned fractures embedded in a purely isotropic background medium may be considered as a long-wavelength effective transversely isotropic medium with a horizontal symmetry axis (HTI). The normal and tangential fracture weaknesses are two key parameters to the evaluation of fracture properties in HTI media, thus the inversion of fracture weaknesses may be used for characterizing the anisotropy in fractured reservoir. The elastic properties of background isotropic media without fractures, however, do not cause azimuthal changes in AVAZ data compared to the fracture anisotropic properties, therefore simultaneous inversion for the background elastic parameters and fracture anisotropic parameters may be not stable. Thus we propose a method of azimuth-difference-based AVAZ direct inversion for fracture weaknesses. First, we extract the fracture symmetry axis azimuth based on the least square ellipse fitting (LSEF) method to obtain a linear AVAZ approximation. Then we build a fractured anisotropic rock-physics model for the estimation of anisotropic well-log information, building the initial background low-frequency trend of fracture weaknesses. Finally, an AVAZ direct inversion method of normal and tangential fracture weaknesses is proposed with the nonlinear Markov chain Monte Carlo (McMC) strategy. So we can eliminate the influence of isotropic background elastic properties on the fracture weakness properties and obtain the normal and tangential fracture weaknesses more stably. Tests on both 2D over-thrust model and real data demonstrate that the normal and tangential fracture weaknesses may be estimated more stably, and it turns out that fracture-developed zones can be identified using the estimated fracture weaknesses.