Hydrocarbon Thin Bed Discrimination with a 3D Propagation Inversion Workflow

In this paper we present a new inversion scheme the “3D Propagation”. We have applied it to a synthetic model composed of thin layers compared to seismic bandwidth. The synthetics have been created in order to mimic the behavior of a thin bed clastic reservoir from the West Shetland. The synthetic test shows that most of the thin bed boundaries as well as property values are accurately resolved by 3D propagation inversion. For comparison, a conventional deterministic inversion is conducted on the synthetic data. It also achieves a good job when a relatively accurate low frequency model is provided.