Seismic Attribute Analysis for Fault/Fracture Delineation and Fractured Reservoir Modeling - North Kuwait Case Study

The recent exploration focus in Kuwait has shifted from finding structural traps to search for unconventional reservoirs, including fractured reservoirs. This abstract is a geological and geophysical integration workflow case study with a focus on practical applications of seismic attribute analysis. It illustrates the workflow from fault/fracture mapping to fractured reservoir modeling. It was observed that seismic attributes are useful for fault/fracture mapping in this area. Co-rendering of many attributes can give us high confidence for fault interpretation. It was also observed that areas with high seismic curvature are associated with high fracture density based on image logs. The combined post-stack inversion and neural network analysis improved the accuracy of porosity estimation. Velocity modeling was the key step in transforming seismic-derived properties (e.g. porosity volume) from time domain to depth domain for reservoir modeling. Through this study, the workflow from fault/fracture detection to fractured reservoir modeling was established, with a main focus on practical application of seismic attributes.