Three-dimensional inversion of inductions logs in real-time

In petroleum production and exploration, having good information about a hydrocarbon reservoir is paramount to successful exploitation. A popular tool is to probe the electric conductivity in a well to obtain direct information of the well surrounding. As wells are nowadays mostly horizontally drilled, this information is becoming more important...

Probing the solution space of an EM inversion problem with a genetic algorithm

In an inversion for the subsurface conductivity distribution using frequency-domain Controlled-Source Electromagnetic data, various amounts of horizontal components may be included. We investigate which combination of components are best suited to invert for a vertical transverse isotropic (VTI) subsurface. We do this by probing the...

Soil properties from seismic intrinsic dispersion

Theoretical and experimental studies in the past have shown the sensitivity of seismic waves to soil/rock properties, such as composition, porosity, pore fluid, and permeability. However, quantitative characterization of these properties has remained challenging. In case of unconsolidated soils, the inherently loose and heterogeneous nature...

Estimating the location of a tunnel using correlation and inversion of Rayleigh wave scattering

The investigation of near-surface scatterers, such as cavities, tunnels, abandoned mine shafts, and buried objects, is important to mitigate geohazards and environmental hazards. By inversion of travel times of cross-correlated scattered waves, due to the incident Rayleigh waves, we estimate the location of a near-surface tunnel from seismic...

Multi-objective full waveform inversion in the absence of low frequencies

Least-squares inversion of seismic reflection waveforms can reconstruct remarkably detailed models of the Earth’s subsurface. However, the cycle-skipping associated with the highfrequency waveforms are responsible for spurious local minima in its objective function. Therefore, it is often difficult for descent methods to converge to the true...

Decoupling of elastic parameters with iterative linearized inversion

Three model parameters as a function of position describe wave propagation in an isotropic elastic medium. Ideally, imaging of data for a point scatterer that consists of a perturbation in one of the elastic parameters should only provide a reconstruction of that perturbation, without cross-talk into the other parameters. This is not the case...

Singular-value decomposition analysis of source illumination in seismic interferometry by multidimensional deconvolution

We have developed a method to analytically evaluate the relationship between the source-receiver configuration and the retrieved wavefield in seismic interferometry performed by multidimensional deconvolution (MDD). The MDD method retrieves the wavefield with the desired source-receiver configuration from the observed wavefield without source...

A new optimization approach for source-encoding full-waveform inversion

Waveform inversion is the method of choice for determining a highly heterogeneous subsurface structure. However, conventional waveform inversion requires that the wavefield for each source is computed separately. This makes it very expensive for realistic 3D seismic surveys. Source-encoding waveform inversion, in which the sources are modeled...

Inversion methods for the separation of blended data

The recording and storage capacity of modern seismic acquisition systems is continuously growing, enabling denser sampling and the acquisition of better-quality data. One big hurdle is survey time, since the duration of a survey is directly proportional to the number of sources fired. The proposed way forward is to deploy nearly simultaneous...

Deblending of seismic data

Seismic imaging is one of the most common geophysical techniques for hydrocarbon exploration. Seismic acquisition is a trade-off between economy and quality. In conventional acquisition, the time intervals between successively firing sources are large enough to avoid interference in time. To obtain an efficient survey, the spatial source...

A modified delay-time method for statics estimation with the virtual refraction

Topography and near-surface heterogeneities lead to traveltime perturbations in surface land-seismic experiments. Usually, these perturbations are estimated and removed prior to further processing of the data. A common technique to estimate these perturbations is the delay-time method. We have developed the “modified delay-time method,” wherein...

Deblending by direct inversion

Deblending of simultaneous-source data is usually considered to be an underdetermined inverse problem, which can be solved by an iterative procedure, assuming additional constraints like sparsity and coherency. By exploiting the fact that seismic data are spatially band-limited, deblending of densely sampled sources can be carried out as a...

Iterative separation of blended marine data: Discussion on the coherence-pass filter

n conventional marine acquisition surveys the time intervals between the firing of successive sources are large enough to avoid interference in time. To obtain an efficient survey, the spatial source sampling is therefore often (too) large. How- ever, much attention has been drawn recently to blended ac- quisition designs, where sources are shot...

Ray-based stochastic inversion of pre-stack seismic data for improved reservoir characterisation

To estimate rock and pore-fluid properties of oil and gas reservoirs in the subsurface, techniques can be used that invert seismic data. Hereby, the detailed information about the reservoir that is available at well locations, such as the thickness and porosity of individual layers, is extrapolated to all locations in the reservoir on the basis...