TO TACKLE THE DECONVOLUTION PROBLEM — A POWERFUL METHOD BASED ON MORE GEOLOGICAL HYPOTHESES

Abstract

The new rules of the game in hydrocarbon exploration demand an exact positioning of the seismic markers in order to define the geometry of the targets more than ever before. However, the degree of success will depend to a great extent on how accurately the amplitude of reflection coefficients can be estimated.

These new requirements mean that all stages of traditional seismic processing have to be critically evaluated. It can be seen, in particular, when assessing existing deconvolution methods for seismic processing, that they are often ill-conditioned to problems posed by the targets of stratigraphic exploration or by reservoir seismic prospecting. The amplitude of the reflectivity function is often estimated inaccurately.

The approach described in this paper abandons the usual hypothesis (white reflectivity spectra) made by deconvolution methods and employs as alternative information the lateral redundancies which are always present on a seismic section. Our method first estimates the location of high amplitude reflectors with good lateral continuity, by means of an elegant automatic picking program. Based on these locations, a generalized inversion can be used to yield the wavelet emitted by the source, and the amplitude of the main reflection coefficients simultaneously for each trace. All the reflection coefficients are then estimated using the amplitudes and the wavelets computed previously.

The various stages of this method which is called Deconvolution-Inversion, developed by Total Compagnie Française des Pétroles, are illustrated in the paper by means of both synthetic and real examples. The ability of the method to preserve the amplitudes makes it a powerful tool for stratigraphic and reservoir seismic prospecting purposes.