A seismic elastic moduli module for the measurements of low-frequency wave dispersion and attenuation of fluid-saturated rocks under different pressures

Knowledge about the seismic elastic modulus dispersion,and associated attenuation,in fluid-saturated rocks is essential for better interpretation of seismic observations taken as part of hydrocarbon identification and time-lapse seismic surveillance of both conventional and unconventional reservoir and overburden performances.A Seismic Elastic Moduli Module has been developed,based on the forced-oscillations method,to experimentally investigate the frequency dependence of Young's modulus and Poisson's ratio,as well as the inferred attenuation,of cylindrical samples under different confining pressure conditions.Calibration with three standard samples showed that the measured elastic moduli were consistent with the published data,indicating that the new apparatus can operate reliably over a wide frequency range of f∈[1-2000,10^(6)]Hz.The Young's modulus and Poisson's ratio of the shale and the tight sandstone samples were measured under axial stress oscillations to assess the frequency-and pressure-dependent effects.Under dry condition,both samples appear to be nearly frequency independent,with weak pressure dependence for the shale and significant pressure dependence for the sandstone.In particular,it was found that the tight sandstone with complex pore microstructure exhibited apparent dispersion and attenuation under brine or glycerin saturation conditions,the levels of which were strongly influenced by the increased effective pressure.In addition,the measured Young's moduli results were compared with the theoretical predictions from a scaled poroelastic model with a reasonably good agreement,revealing that the combined fluid flow mechanisms at both mesoscopic and microscopic scales possibly responsible for the measured dispersion.

Sensitivity of seismic attenuation and dispersion to dynamic elastic interactions of connected fractures: Quasi-static finite element modeling study

Prediction of seismic attenuation and dispersion that are inherently sensitive to hydraulic and elastic properties of the medium of interest in the presence of mesoscopic fractures and pores,is of great interest in the characterization of fractured formations.This has been very difficult,however,considering that stress interactions between fractures and pores,related to their spatial distributions,tend to play a crucial role on affecting overall dynamic elastic properties that are largely unexplored.We thus choose to quantitatively investigate frequency-dependent P-wave characteristics in fractured porous rocks at the scale of a representative sample using a numerical scale-up procedure via performing finite element modelling.Based on 2-D numerical quasi-static experiments,effects of fracture and fluid properties on energy dissipation in response to wave-induced fluid flow at the mesoscopic scale are quantified via solving Biot's equations of consolidation.We show that numerical results are sensitive to some key characteristics of probed synthetic rocks containing unconnected and connected fractures,demonstrating that connectivity,aperture and inclination of fractures as well as fracture infills exhibit strong impacts on the two manifestations of WIFF mechanisms in the connected scenario,and on resulting total wave attenuation and phase velocity.This,in turn,illustrates the importance of these two WIFF mechanisms in fractured rocks and thus,a deeper understanding of them may eventually allow for a better characterization of fracture systems using seismic methods.Moreover,this presented work combines rock physics predictions with seismic numerical simulations in frequency domain to illustrate the sensitivity of seismic signatures on the monitoring of an idealized geologic CO_(2) sequestration in fractured reservoirs.The simulation demonstrates that these two WIFF mechanisms can strongly modify seismic records and hence,indicating that incorporating the two energy dissipation mechanisms in the geophysical interpretation can potentially improving the monitoring and surveying of fluid variations in fractured formations.

Petrophysical parameters inversion for heavy oil reservoir based on a laboratory-calibrated frequency-variant rock-physics model

Heavy oil has high density and viscosity, and exhibits viscoelasticity. Gassmann's theory is not suitable for materials saturated with viscoelastic fluids. Directly applying such model leads to unreliable results for seismic inversion of heavy oil reservoir. To describe the viscoelastic behavior of heavy oil, we modeled the elastic properties of heavy oil with varying viscosity and frequency using the Cole-Cole-Maxwell (CCM) model. Then, we used a CCoherent Potential Approximation (CPA) instead of the Gassmann equations to account for the fluid effect, by extending the single-phase fluid condition to two-phase fluid (heavy oil and water) condition, so that partial saturation of heavy oil can be considered. This rock physics model establishes the relationship between the elastic modulus of reservoir rock and viscosity, frequency and saturation. The viscosity of the heavy oil and the elastic moduli and porosity of typical reservoir rock samples were measured in laboratory, which were used for calibration of the rock physics model. The well-calibrated frequency-variant CPA model was applied to the prediction of the P- and S-wave velocities in the seismic frequency range (1–100 Hz) and the inversion of petrophysical parameters for a heavy oil reservoir. The pre-stack inversion results of elastic parameters are improved compared with those results using the CPA model in the sonic logging frequency (∼10 kHz), or conventional rock physics model such as the Xu-Payne model. In addition, the inversion of the porosity of the reservoir was conducted with the simulated annealing method, and the result fits reasonably well with the logging curve and depicts the location of the heavy oil reservoir on the time slice. The application of the laboratory-calibrated CPA model provides better results with the velocity dispersion correction, suggesting the important role of accurate frequency dependent rock physics models in the seismic prediction of heavy oil reservoirs.

A review on reflection-waveform inversion

Full-waveform inversion(FWI)utilizes optimization methods to recover an optimal Earth model to best fit the observed seismic record in a sense of a predefined norm.Since FWI combines mathematic inversion and full-wave equations,it has been recognized as one of the key methods for seismic data imaging and Earth model building in the fields of global/regional and exploration seismology.Unfortunately,conventional FWI fixes background velocity mainly relying on refraction and turning waves that are commonly rich in large offsets.By contrast,reflections in the short offsets mainly contribute to the reconstruction of the high-resolution interfaces.Restricted by acquisition geometries,refractions and turning waves in the record usually have limited penetration depth,which may not reach oil/gas reservoirs.Thus,reflections in the record are the only source that carries the information of these reservoirs.Consequently,it is meaningful to develop reflection-waveform inversion(RWI)that utilizes reflections to recover background velocity including the deep part of the model.This review paper includes:analyzing the weaknesses of FWI when inverting reflections;overviewing the principles of RWI,including separation of the tomography and migration components,the objective functions,constraints;summarizing the current status of the technique of RWI;outlooking the future of RWI.

Modeling the efects of fracture infll on frequency‑dependent anisotropy and AVO response of a fractured porous layer

In a fractured porous hydrocarbon reservoir,wave velocities and refections depend on frequency and incident angle.A proper description of the frequency dependence of amplitude variations with ofset(AVO)signatures should allow efects of fracture inflls and attenuation and dispersion of fractured media.The novelty of this study lies in the introduction of an improved approach for the investigation of incident-angle and frequency variations-associated refection responses.The improved AVO modeling method,using a frequency-domain propagator matrix method,is feasible to accurately consider velocity dispersion predicted from frequency-dependent elasticities from a rock physics modeling.And hence,the method is suitable for use in the case of an anisotropic medium with aligned fractures.Additionally,the proposed modeling approach allows the combined contributions of layer thickness,interbedded structure,impedance contrast and interferences to frequency-dependent refection coefcients and,hence,yielding seismograms of a layered model with a dispersive and attenuative reservoir.Our numerical results show bulk modulus of fracture fuid signifcantly afects anisotropic attenuation,hence causing frequencydependent refection abnormalities.These implications indicate the study of amplitude versus angle and frequency(AVAF)variations provides insights for better interpretation of refection anomalies and hydrocarbon identifcation in a layered reservoir with vertical transverse isotropy(VTI)dispersive media.

Inverse spectral decomposition using an I_p-norm constraint for the detection of close geological anomalies

An important application of spectral decomposition(SD)is to identify subsurface geological anomalies such as channels and karst caves,which may be buried in full-band seismic data.However,the classical SD methods including the wavelet transform(WT)are often limited by relatively low time-frequency resolution,which is responsible for false high horizonassociated space resolution probably indicating more geological structures,especially when close geological anomalies exist.To address this issue,we impose a constraint of minimizing an lp(0<p<1)norm of time-frequency spectral coefficients on the misfit derived by using the inverse WT and apply the generalized iterated shrinkage algorithm to invert for the optimal coefficients.Compared with the WT and inverse SD(ISD)using a typical l1-norm constraint,the modified ISD(MISD)using an lp-norm constraint can yield a more compact spectrum contributing to detect the distributions of close geological features.We design a 3 D synthetic dataset involving frequency-close thin geological anomalies and the other3 D non-stationary dataset involving time-close anomalies to demonstrate the effectiveness of MISD.The application of 4 D spectrum on a 3 D real dataset with an area of approximately 230 km2 illustrates its potential for detecting deep channels and the karst slope fracture zone.

SegNet-based first-break picking via seismic waveform classification directly from shot gathers with sparsely distributed traces

Manually picking regularly and densely distributed first breaks(FBs)are critical for shallow velocitymodel building in seismic data processing.However,it is time consuming.We employ the fullyconvolutional Seg Net to address this issue and present a fast automatic seismic waveform classification method to pick densely-sampled FBs directly from common-shot gathers with sparsely distributed traces.Through feeding a large number of representative shot gathers with missing traces and the corresponding binary labels segmented by manually interpreted fully-sampled FBs,we can obtain a welltrained Seg Net model.When any unseen gather including the one with irregular trace spacing is inputted,the Seg Net can output the probability distribution of different categories for waveform classification.Then FBs can be picked by locating the boundaries between one class on post-FBs data and the other on pre-FBs background.Two land datasets with each over 2000 shots are adopted to illustrate that one well-trained 25-layer Seg Net can favorably classify waveform and further pick fully-sampled FBs verified by the manually-derived ones,even when the proportion of randomly missing traces reaches50%,21 traces are missing consecutively,or traces are missing regularly.