Unconventional seismic attributes for fracture characterization

Hardeep Jaglan, Farrukh Qayyum and Hélène Huck introduce several new geometrical attributes that help in characterizing fault networks, fractures density and their connectivity. Faults and fractures are generally represented as discontinuous reflection patterns on seismic data and mostly appear as linear, sub-linear or curvilinear features in three dimensions. In seismic interpretation faults are routinely detected through multi-trace seismic attributes such as coherency, similarity, semblance, variance, curvature, dip, azimuth, etc. These attributes are often grouped as geometrical attributes because they mostly help in defining the geometrical nature of seismic reflections. The objective of this paper is to introduce several new geometrical attributes that help in characterizing fault networks, fractures density and their connectivity. The proposed attributes are derived after specialized workflows based on a precomputed dip-azimuth volume. These attributes are referred as unconventional fracture attributes because they are new and not routinely applied to fault detection and characterization.