Using Modern Geophysical Technology to Explore for Bypassed Opportunities in the Gulf of Mexico

摘要

The Gulf of Mexico Shelf is a mature oil and gas province that has been producing hydrocarbons since the early 1950's. Technology advances during the last five decades have led to the identification of new exploration prospects on deep structures, subtle traps, and direct detection of hydrocarbons via seismic amplitude anomalies and AVO (amplitude vs. offset) studies. There are good opportunities remaining in old fields that require another "step change" in technology application. Seismic inversion is the process of determining the physical characteristics of rocks and fluids which have produced the seismic record. Inversion attempts to remove the effects of the seismic wavelet and therefore is the opposite of forward modeling. Inversion is a dataset that ties all the wells in an area and also honors all the seismic data. Multi-disciplined asset teams benefit from advanced seismic technologies by using an integrated rock-property based solution to maximize results in exploration, well planning, drilling, production, and reservoir management. The key to success in to understand the rocks with tools to interpret and define Hthology, porosity, fluids, pore pressure and reservoir quality; providing seismic data in a geologically meaningful and multi-disciplinary useable format. Conventionally seismic inversion produces P velocity, S velocity and density. Log analysis, also an inversion process, starts with velocity and density, as well as other measurements, and finishes with Hthology, porosity and fluids. The relatively new science of Seismic Petrophysics bridges the gap between these two workflows by starting with seismic data and resulting with 3D seismic volumes of Hthology, porosity and fluids. An old field was purchased with intent of applying new technology in the search of bypassed opportunities. This case study will document the results of the work.