The Effect of Anticlines on Seismic Fracture Characterization and Inversion Based on a 3D Numerical Study

Abstract

This work presents a 3D numerical study of the effect of anticline on seismic fracture density inversion with singular value decomposition (SVD) technique in an area where a pilot application study with the same technique has previously been carried out. The effect of the anticline structure was studied by inverting of synthetic datasets which were generated using 3D Finite Difference modeling in fractured media. Two anisotropic 2.5D models with different thickness for the fractured reservoir as well as one isotropic 2.5D model were designed and full-wave synthetic datasets were calculated. The SVD inversion technique was then applied to the three datasets in order to assess the influence of the anticline in the fracture density inversion results. From the outcome of this study, we find that fracture density is well resolved in the apex of the anticline whilst it is over-estimated at the two flanks of the anticline. Moreover, the results indicate the leading term in the SVD decomposition is the most robust and reliable attribute for fracture density inversion.