Quantitative fracture prediction from seismic data

This paper presents results obtained from an area located east of Bremen, Germany, where gas is produced from a deep Rotliegend sandstone reservoir. Faults, fractures and associated deformation bands at reservoir depth have an important influence on the productivity of the gas field as fractures are cemented and tight and may act as permeability barriers. This contribution comprises the development of new coherency tools to better image sub-seismic faults and lineaments from seismic data, and the development of fracture attributes in order to quantify fracturation and its areal distribution.

The fractal behaviour of faults was used to establish a relationship between coherency processed seismic data and borehole images at log scale. The ‘fractal dimension’ (FD) of the length of a fault population can be interpreted as a characteristic parameter describing local geology in terms of fracturation. Calculating FD for each point of a seismic grid yields an areal distribution of this value. Correlating seismic-derived FD values and fracture populations derived from borehole images defined a linear relationship which can be used to forecast the distribution of sub-seismic fractures and deformation from seismic data.