Monitoring the change in horizontal stress with multi-wave time-lapse seismic response based on nonlinear elasticity theory

Abstract

Monitoring the change in horizontal stress from the geophysical data is a tough challenge, and it has a crucial impact on broad practical scenarios which involve reservoir exploration and development, carbon dioxide (CO2) injection and storage, shallow surface prospecting and deep-earth structure description. The change in in-situ stress induced by hydrocarbon production and localized tectonic movements causes the changes in rock mechanic properties (e.g. wave velocities, density and anisotropy) and further causes the changes in seismic amplitudes, phases and travel times. In this study, the nonlinear elasticity theory that regards the rock skeleton (solid phase) and pore fluid as an effective whole is used to characterize the effect of horizontal principal stress on rock overall elastic properties and the stress-dependent anisotropy parameters are therefore formulated. Then the approximate P-wave, SV-wave and SH-wave angle-dependent reflection coefficient equations for the horizontal-stress-induced anisotropic media are proposed. It is shown that, on the different reflectors, the stress-induced relative changes in reflectivities (i.e., relative difference) of elastic parameters (i.e., P- and S-wave velocities and density) are much less than the changes in contrasts of anisotropy parameters. Therefore, the effects of stress change on the reflectivities of three elastic parameters are reasonably neglected to further propose an AVO inversion approach incorporating P-, SH- and SV-wave information to estimate the change in horizontal principal stress from the corresponding time-lapse seismic data. Compared with the existing methods, our method eliminates the need for man-made rock-physical or fitting parameters, providing more stable predictive power. 1D test illustrates that the estimated result from time-lapse P-wave reflection data shows the most reasonable agreement with the real model, while the estimated result from SH-wave reflection data shows the largest bias. 2D test illustrates the feasibility of the proposed inversion method for estimating the change in horizontal stress from P-wave time-lapse seismic data.