Non‐rigid matching of migrated time‐lapse seismic

Abstract

A crucial prerequisite to extract useful information from time-lapse seismic is to calibrate or match the seismic data of the different vintages to each other. This step ideally guarantees that all changes between the seismic responses of the vintages can be attributed to changes due to production and not to acquisition artifacts or noise. In this paper, we concentrate on matching migrated seismic vol-umes of a 4D data set, which have already been reprocessed to best possibly compensate for changes in the acquisition instrumenta-tion and geometry. Introducing a new non-rigid matching method, we show at hand of data from the Gullfaks field in the North Sea that it is possible to generate a reliable seismic difference cube that significantly enhances the contrast between the areas where the changes can be related to drainage in the reservoir and the areas where changes are due to noise.