Visualisation and delineation techniques adopted from other industries to increase productivity of the G&G work in the oil and gas industry

Abstract

Given the recent increase of seismic data quality owing to improvements in seismic acquisition and processing, it is surprising to realise that the oil and gas industry is still using standard desktop screens with 256 colour resolution software displays, and for most of the seismic representations, using only three types of colour bars (peak-trough, grey scale or rainbow) for human interpretation, comprehension and decision making processes. Knowing that these displays show 0.000006% of the details captured in 32 bit resolution data, it is a wonder: is the oil and gas industry using the available data to its maximum potential to decrease the risk of drilling dry wells? Astronomy and medical imaging tackled these issues long ago and inspired by them, the oil and gas industry is able to use a 24 bit colour space for representing seismic data in a more appealing way. These innovative seismic data representations are called colour blends and are created using sources such as frequency decomposition products, angle stacks, edge attributes, 4D vintages or any other seismic attributes colour-coded with primary colours. Colour blends have not yet become mainstream due to availability of the tools. The cognitive cybernetics approach allows a more balanced input between data driven processes, interpreter skills and guidance, and has recently been made available for use with colour blends—a breakthrough in interpretation. This extended abstract shows recent advances in these two techniques and how they benefit to the geological and geophysical work based on a case study from the Australian and New Zealand sector.