Is Thin Turbiditic Sand Winning – A Case Study on High Resolution Processing and Interpretation?

For an asset team one of many challenges is to accurately map the reservoirs for rock volume estimation in order to establish a development plan. However, when the reservoirs are thin they become more difficult to map given limitations of conventional seismic bandwidth. In this paper we present a real case study of processing a 2005 3D seismic dataset in REPSOL’s Ballena permits, offshore North Spain. We describe a workflow of producing high resolution inversion results through a resolution enhancement technique (Bandwidth Extension), a processing sequence to optimize prestack data quality and a 3-term prestack seismic inversion. The resolution-enhanced seismic data and inversion results were able to increase the vertical resolution from 25 m to 12 m with better ties to the known wells in the area. The results further helped individualize the thin turbiditic sands into two different lobes which were difficult to map using normal bandwidth data and inversion results.