Surface Passive Seismic in Kuwait

Surface passive seismic is a direct hydrocarbon saturation indicator technique. It detects the presence of subsurface hydrocarbons by recording and spectroscopically analyzing the low-frequency acoustic/seismic background noise (between 0.5- 10 Hz) which is actively emitted by the earth. The measurements after filtering and analysis can be calibrated with well data and integrated with other geophysical data to provide information which can lower the uncertainty level for drilling and field development decisions. Measurements were carried out in Kuwait to evaluate their suitability to map the extent of hydrocarbon occurrences. The main concern being the suitability of the technology to differentiate between various reservoirs in stacked-reservoir environment. The level of certainty in the resulting map could not be accessed as there is a possibility that some deep reservoirs have not penetrated by the wells in the area of the experiment. It was concluded that the technology (at this point) cannot indicate the distribution of the occurrence among the stacked reservoirs since the measured indicators are the summation of the response of all the underlying reservoir layers. Nevertheless, the areas with highest hydrocarbon potential indication will normally be the most interesting ones.