Typhoon‐Boris gulf of Mexico oil field — a spectrum broadening case study

Abstract

In this paper the methodology of spectrum broadening of 3-D seismic data is applied to the Typhoon-Boris oil field in the Gulf of Mexico. The Typhoon-Boris oil field is located in the Green Canyon part of the deepwater basin of the Gulf of Mexico. The field was discovered in the year 2001, an appraisal well was drilled in year 2002 and first oil production started in February 2003. The TyphoonBoris field after careful amplitude preservation processing was discovered as a set of bright amplitude anomalies. The seismic bandwidth in the zone of interest has a peak Fourier transform frequency at about 14 Hz. Due to the narrow bandwidth of the 3-D seismic data and the need for high resolution stratigraphic and structural interpretation of the field, 3-D spectrum broadening was applied. Spectrum Broadening is a new technology which estimates robustly the amplitudes of the high frequencies using the amplitudes of the low and medium frequencies. The resulting spectrum broadened 3-D seismic volume contain high resolution structural and stratigraphic information which correlates well with wide bandwidth well log synthetic seismograms.