Improved Seismic Reservoir Characterization with Interbed Multiple Suppression
April 11, 11:30 PM – 1:00 PM CDT
Midland, TX, Bush Convention Center
Speaker: Gabriel Gil, Lumina’s Chief Geophysicist
Interbed multiples make it difficult to correlate seismic data to wells, resulting in incorrect interpretation and mapping of seismic events thought to be associated to reservoir responses. Multiples are a known source of seismic noise that, when interfering with primary events, often result in subtle, but significant, time delays and phase rotations of the seismic response. This effect is more dramatic in seismically dim reservoir levels. The strength and number of interbed multiples depend on the elastic properties contrast between layers and their thickness relative to the wavelength of the seismic waves. Additionally, multiples are not limited to shallow layers, but instead occur all along the vertical column. Typically, they can vary laterally depending on the local geology, and are often present in all offsets with similar move-outs as primary events, making them hard to detect and eliminate. The workflow presented shows a model-based approach to predict and suppress interbed multiples on migrated pre-stack data using an adaptive subtraction method. This workflow was applied to seismic data in the Midland basin and improved correlations to available well data. These steps plus subsequent elastic properties estimation show an improvement in the seismic image achieved by removing interbed multiple interference.
