Volume
Interpretation from Regional to Prospect Scale: on the Desktop!
Weatherill, Philip M.1, Mark
Stockwell2, Howard Chan2, Les Ruthven2, Paul
Xu2, Rick Palmer2, Charlie Huang2, Tom Holley2
(1) Shell International E&P, Houston, TX (2) Shell International E&P,
We describe why interpreters should be
making more use of volume interpretation and vizualization now, enablers which
facilitate deployment of this technology on the desktop, and a case history of
applying these techniques within Shell.
Several trends have converged to yield a
powerful tool for the interpretation of large seismic data sets in 3D: 1)
Significantly improved graphics performance of recent workstations, 2)
Multi-gigabyte memory is available at reasonable cost, 3) Operating systems capable
of addressing large memory volumes, 4) High performance I/O capabilities,
including new formats, streamline input of data from disk, 5) Cost of disk
storage is now negligible in the price of an interpretation workstation, 6) New
and improved applications enable realistic interpretation workflows from
regional to the prospect scale.
Because of these improvements we have
reached a tipping point with volume interpretation. Unfortunately, many
interpreters, overburdened with an ever-increasing workload, are likely unaware
at just how much the field has changed.
Deepwater offshore Brazil is an active
play for Shell. We recently implemented two volume interpretation and
visualization projects over very large areas (10-20,000 sq km), on high-end
desktop workstations, to better integrate all data and knowledge with the aim
of deriving further exploration insights and reducing interpretation
cycle-time.
This initiative has been successful.
Demonstrated benefits include visualization of entire petroleum systems and
faster regional mapping. All interpreters interrogating complex 3D problems who
wish to extract maximum insights from their datasets in short timeframes will
need to embrace the new volume interpretation and visualization technologies.
AAPG Search and Discover Article #90063©2007 AAPG Annual Convention, Long Beach, California