Folds,Faijlts,Fissu res,and Fractures

摘要

Exploration teams miss their targets more often than they like,especially in the Foothills Front region.Often they must drill more than one multi-million-dollar well to locate the natural gas they know lies beneath the fractured,folded,corrugated layers of rock.At a minimum cost of 3.8 million for a 2,800-metre-deep well-more than the cost of a mansion in Mount Royal-that's an expensive proposition.Finding the elusive sweet spots in these plays requires creative thinking.When a relative newcomer like Rob Vestrum,a geophysi-cist who runs a team of seismic imaging specialists at Thrust Belt Imaging,demonstrates that by using anisotropic depth migration he can save a company from drilling another dry hole,he earns kudos from a demanding group of geoscientists.