First Break - Volume 29, Issue 5, 2011

The way subsurface data is handled can have a significant impact on the overall performance of E&P organizations. ‘The business value case for data management –a study’© commissioned by Common Data Access, subsidiary of the oil company representative body UK Oil & Gas, finds that improvements in data management could pay substantial dividends. We present here an abridged version of the Data Results section of the study.

Steve Meyer, Patrick Bermingham and Hans Tetteroo are involved in Shell Learning. Here they describe recent initiatives to harness online options for delivering training courses to the company’s personnel around the world.

The performance of unconventional oil and gas companies is demonstrably uncompetitive compared to conventional oil and gas companies. Ruud Weijermars1 and Steve Watson2 highlight how technology deployment and rolling investment decisions are critical to improving the performance of unconventional field development projects.

Victor Martin, Alain-Christophe Bon, Maud Stankoff-Godart and Pierre-Olivier Lys discuss some of the modelling and interpretation issues presented by a subsalt domain in deep offshore Gulf of Guinea.

K. Filippova (Fugro-Jason), A. Kozhenkov (Fugro-Jason) and A. Alabushin (LUKOIL-Komi)provide an overview of the general principles of deterministic and geostatistical inversions of seismic data. They demonstrate with a case study from the Timano-Pechora province that reservoir properties prediction methodology using geostatistical partial stacks inversion can facilitate high resolution 3D distribution of reservoir properties used to plan production well spacing, further verified by drilling.

Philip Wild of Ikon Science reviews a variety of practical applications of seismic anisotropy, all aimed at obtaining improvements in sub-surface imaging and reservoir characterization.

Andrew Jennings reviews some exploration and development technologies employed by Schlumberger that have supported the economic production of shale gas in the US and are now being applied to resources in Europe and around the world.

Ian Threadgold, Charles Jeffrey, Eelco Sixma and Danny Garcia say the relationship between the E&P companies and the geophysical contracting community regarding health, safety, security, and the environment (HSSE) is a model of cooperation that can only help to reduce incidents, save lives and improve industry efficiency.

Frequency analysis of surface waves is an efficient tool to retrieve the vertical shear-wave velocity profile. Surface waves result from the interaction of elastic body waves with a free surface. They are commonly generated by impulsive sources but are also present in ambient noise. Here we compare the results of interferometric estimation of surface-wave dispersion from controlled noise sources by using both cross-correlation and deconvolution methods. The crucial step in both methods lies in the dispersion image computation that conditions the reliability of the dispersion curve, and therefore the inversion results. We have found that the dispersion characteristics of surface waves are better defined when the deconvolution method is used. This better definition is probably due to the relative independence of the deconvolved output from the source function.