Streamlining Seismic Interpretation Through Visualisation and Analysis

Freeman, Stephen R.¹
 Harris, Simon D.¹
 Wood, Kevin¹
 Knipe, Rob J.¹

In this contribution we present a series of visualisation enhancements that are aimed at streamlining the seismic interpretation workflow. These tools are aimed at providing the seismic interpreter with more intuitive information on the form of the interpretation being developed. This should help focus the interpretation effort and hence lead to a high-quality interpretation being developed more rapidly.

The tools include techniques to: (i) rapidly visualise potential problem areas in the interpretation (e.g. mispicks/misties); (ii) solve these issues; (iii) identify the critical parts of the interpretation that have the most influence on the final geometry; (iv) automatically define the interpretation limits (interior and exterior) of seed or auto-tracked grids; (v) automatically generate interpretation outline definition for constraining auto-tracking; (vi) extrapolate high-quality surfaces through interpretation data so that the resulting surfaces honour the seed pick limits that define the fault and edge breaks; (vii) edge detection on horizon interpretation and surface data to rapidly identify fault breaks within the data; and (viii) automatic filtering of the interpretation data to remove poor quality data or fault break zones.

These tools have been integrated into Petrel using the Ocean development environment (www.slb.com), and can therefore be directly accessed during an on-going seismic interpretation, thus providing the interpreter with real-time feedback on the geometric sense and form of the interpretation being developed.

These techniques will immediately simplify and streamline many of the manual, time-consuming parts of developing an interpretation. When the interpretation has been produced, the tools then allow for more accurate prospect/field maps to be produced that tightly honour the interpreter’s decisions. Our techniques to help define the location of faults prior to the fault stick interpretation have the advantage of either: (i) allowing a highly focused fault interpretation to be performed (because the interpreter knows the location and connections of the faults); or (ii) providing a sufficient understanding of the scale of faulting that no fault stick interpretation is required to appropriately characterise the reservoir.

We have applied these techniques on a range of exploration and production projects and found a significant improvement in both the interpreter’s experience and the overall geological understanding developed.