Advanced imaging and inversion for unconventional resource plays

Abstract

Unconventional resource plays have now reached mainstream in terms of the amount of commercial exploration and production activity within these fields. In this paper we introduce a no-compromise advanced workflow for imaging and prestack inversion of 3D seismic data for unconventional resource plays. The imaging portion of the workflow includes a calibrated tomography that simultaneously solves for vertical velocity and TI anisotropy, ensuring accurate well ties during prestack depth migration. The prestack inversion portion of the workflow includes both azimuthal traveltime and amplitude inversion schemes. The resulting seismic attributes are well suited to help predict future well performance in planning the development of these fields.