Fracture and Stress from in Situ, Full-azimuth Seismic Data - Application to a Kuwait Oil Field Dataset

To better understand fractured reservoir behavior, geophysicists often rely on directional groupings of surface recorded seismic data that can be imaged and run through inversion processes to obtain fracture orientation and intensity attributes.

We propose an innovative seismic imaging and inversion system carried out in depth, in which seismic data events are imaged and decomposed in the Local Angle Domain into two complementary full-azimuth angle gather systems with fully sampled directivities and reflectivities. The combination of the two angle gathers, together with the ability to handle the full-azimuth information in a continuous manner, enables the generation and extraction of high-resolution information about subsurface angle dependent reflectivity in localized 3D space. It expands our knowledge about both continuous structural surfaces and discontinuous objects, such as faults and small-scale fractures, leading to accurate, high-resolution, high-certainty, velocity model determination and seismic reservoir characterization.

The objective of this paper is to describe the technology and to illustrate its benefits by applying it to a set of fractured reservoirs (carbonates and gas shales) in a Kuwait oil field.