Integrated Visco-Acoustic Model Building: a Case Study Illustrating the Challenges and Benefits for Large Scale Exploration

The seismic character of Early and Late Cretaceous plays in deep water Côte d'Ivoire data are affected by Late Cretaceous and Paleocene channel and canyon systems. Unresolved, these create structural uncertainty and impacting amplitude fidelity. Using an integrated visco-acoustic model building sequence we resolve the impact of complex Late Cretaceous and Paleocene channel systems on deeper targets. A full wavefield FWI approach creates an accurate velocity model removing the structural uncertainty when used in the imaging step. Viscoacoustic effects were determined using tomography. Fully integrated into the sequence, this method calculated measures of log spectral ratio in demigrated space, mitigating stretch and tuning effects. The resulting combination of the complete visco-acoustic model building flow compensated for the structural complexity of the area, whilst significantly improving the amplitude fidelity of the dataset.