Seismic petrophysics focused case study for AVA modelling and pre-stack seismic inversion

Abstract

Hydrocarbon reservoirs are characterised by integrating seismic, well-log and petrophysical information, which are dissimilar in spatial distribution, scale and relationship to reservoir properties. Well logs are essential for amplitude versus offset (AVO) modelling and seismic inversion. The usability of well logs can be determined during wavelet estimation, seismic-to-well ties, background model building, property distribution for inversion, deriving probability density functions and variograms, offset-to-angle conversion of seismic data, and many other processes. For the implementation of seismic inversion workflows, accurate and geologically corrected compressional-sonic, shear-sonic and density logs are necessary. Preparing the logs for quantitative interpretation becomes challenging in a real-field environment because of bad borehole conditions including washouts, uncalibrated and variability of logging tools, invasion effects, missing shear logs and change of borehole size. Conventional petrophysical analysis is usually restricted to the reservoir interval, the calculation of reservoir versus non-reservoir (including sands or shales), and log corrections for smaller intervals; in contrast, seismic petrophysics encompasses the entire geological interval, calculates the volume of multi-minerals, incorporates boundaries between non-reservoir and reservoir, and often includes the prediction of missing compressional and shear-sonic for AVO analysis. A detailed seismic petrophysics analysis was performed for amplitude versus angle (AVA) modelling and attributes analysis. To perform the AVA modelling, a series of forward models in association with rock physics modelled fluid-substituted logs were developed, and associated seismic responses for various pore fluids and rock types studied. The results reveal that synthetic seismic responses together with the AVA analysis show changes for various lithologies. AVA attributes analysis show trends in generated synthetic seismic responses for various fluid-substituted and porosity logs. Reservoir modelling and fluid substitution increases understanding of the observed seismic response. This paper describes detailed data analysis using various techniques to confirm the rock model for petrophysical evaluation, rock physics modelling, AVA analysis, pre-stack seismic inversion, and the scenario modelling applied to the study of an oil field in Australia.