Reducing Drilling Hazard Risk in a Carbonate Environment Using Seismic Processing, Diffraction Imaging and Interpretation

Buried structural anomalies within carbonate depositional environments, such as karst sinkholes, impose significant dangers for borehole integrity and drilling equipment due to rapid changes in rock properties (from tight to the porous) potentially resulting in extensive mud loss, drill bit jamming and other complications. This often leads to delays in the well construction planning and sometimes to subsequent sidetrack drilling and a dramatic increase in costs. Thus, Paleo-karst localization, prior to well planning and construction, becomes a critical task for economic optimization. However, this is a non-trivial exercise due to the relatively small scale and size of karst type features and anomalies, which are at the limit of lateral resolution of most standard surface geophysical methods. In this paper, we introduce a methodology of karst prediction based on a combination of targeted 3D seismic processing and integration of the diffracted wavefield anomalies in addition to use of conventional seismic attributes. The presented approach has been proven to be efficient to detect karsts in a real oil field and can be deployed in other regions.