Industrial evolution of depth imaging model building techniques - a Timor Sea case study

Abstract

The evolution of depth imaging technologies in the past ten years has seen significant changes in the way we built velocity-depth macro models used by pre-stack depth migration algorithms. Both the observation of the data used for tomography inversion of macro models and the performance of inversion themselves have undergone significant changes in the recent years. This has lead to new model building methodologies. Depth imaging has been (and still is) regarded as a state of the art - yet long and expensive - solution to improve the quality of the interpretation material. How can new trends in model building methodologies provide solutions to faster, yet high quality depth imaging products? We attempt to answer this question. A case study is presented where a comparison is made between two pre-stack depth migration results obtained with two different depth imaging model building techniques performed on the same dataset. At an industrial scale through this example we try to identify the key elements of the methodology that can make differences to the quality of the final product and the speed at which we obtain it. For obvious economic reasons, rare are the opportunities to look at new technologies on the same field dataset where the work has been performed both before and after the evolution. However, the opportunity to examine such evolution has been made possible for depth imaging model building techniques with this Timor Sea case study.