Structural joint inversion of AVO and CSEM data using flexible representations

Abstract

Exploiting information from multiple data sets can improve the quality of the estimated parameters and thereby the reliability of the resulting reservoir predictions. Combination of multiple data types can be done sequentially, where the model parameters are updated based on the information from one data type at the time; or simultaneously, where at each parameter update, the joint information from all available data types is taken into account. The latter approach has the prospect of stabilising the inversion by constraining the inversion with a higher degree of information. In this work, we present a method for structure‐coupled joint inversion of controlled source electromagnetic (CSEM) data and seismic AVO data with application to production monitoring. By reformulating the unknown model parameters in terms of common structural relationships, we obtain a common model parameter that shares sensitivity to both data sets. The performance of the structurally coupled inversion is tested on synthetic examples where we compare the results of joint versus separate inversion of the data sets. We also investigate into the robustness of the joint inversion strategy with respect to a specific type of modelling errors.