What is it about?
Seismic imaging of the subsurface improves reservoir management and enables new discoveries of valuable energy sources such as oil and natural gas. Seismic imaging quality paradoxically depends on good estimates of the subsurface properties that affect seismic wave propagation. The most important subsurface property that affects image quality is the velocity of the wave. Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is a well-established method for estimating seismic wave velocities.
Featured Image
Photo by Joshua Case on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The effectiveness of FWI has been demonstrated in marine environments much more extensively than on land. This paper shows that recent advancements to FWI are beginning to make FWI effective on land seismic--even in the very challenging Delaware Basin.
Perspectives
Even though the FWI updates only the shallow velocities, the image quality improves at depth as seen both on the stack and pre-stack image gathers.
Gary Murphy
Chevron Corp
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Land FWI in the Delaware Basin, west Texas: A case study, The Leading Edge, May 2020, Society of Exploration Geophysicists,
DOI: 10.1190/tle39050324.1.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
