Seismic Prospecting

Lecture 8 3-D Seismic Reflection Method

Why 3-D? 3 Subsurface geological features of interest in hydrocarbon exploration are three dimensional in nature. Example: salt dome, overthrust and folded belts, major unconformities, reefs, and deltaic sands. 2-D seismic normally assumes that all the signal comes from the plane of the profile itself but out-of-plane reflections often are observed. The out-of-plane signal caused 2-D migrated sections to mistie.
These misties are due to inadequate imaging of the subsurface resulting from the use of 2-D rather than 3-D migration. 3-D migration of 3-D data provides an adequate and detailed 3-D image of the subsurface.

Land 3-D acquisition

The areal coverage derived from a single pair of crossing lines in a three-dimensional survey. Each dot represents the mid-point between a shot and a detector.

Reflected ray paths defining a common depth point from an areal distribution of shot points and detector locations in a 3-D survey.

DEFINITIONS OF 3-D TERMS

Box (sometimes called Unit Cell) In orthogonal 3-D surveys, this term applies to the area bounded by two adjacent source lines and two adjacent receiver Lines CMP Bin (or Bin) A small rectangular area. All mid points that lie inside this area, or bin, are assumed to belong to the same common midpoint

Cross-line Direction The direction that is orthogonal to receiver lines. In-line Direction The direction that is parallel to receiver lines. Patch A patch refers to all live receiver stations that record data from a given source point in the 3-D survey.

Acquisition Fringe
In order to ensure uniform coverage of the target area after migration, data must be acquired across a broader area:

Land 3-D Equipments 3Explosive source Vibrator source

Land 3-D Equipments 3Geophone Recording unit

Marine 3-D Acquisition

Marine 3-D data are generally acquired using a boat towing a hydrophone array (streamer) and an array of air guns. The boat traverses the area back and forth. Shot/receiver lines are oriented parallel to the structural dip direction.

Marine 3-D acquisition (cont.) 3 To save on the ship costs, several (up to 6) parallel streamers can be towed by one ship. Or, two source arrays firing alternately could create two lines of midpoints in one pass:

Marine 3-D acquisition (cont.) 3 Typical geometry with two source arrays and two streamers:

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Streamer Feathering
Due to cross-current, the streamers and sources often deviate away from the track. This shifts the actual reflection midpoints and creates uneven fold. Therefore, accurate positioning of all components is critical.

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Positioning
GPS and radio trilateration of the ship (to ~10-m accuracy) Sometimes anchored pingers are also used to locate the survey within an area. Pingers (tuned acoustic pulse devices) are used to trilaterate the mutual positions of the ship, sources, and streamers. Feathering direction is controlled with compasses installed in the streamer. This results in great redundancy of navigation data. This redundancy is utilized in data reduction using the ideas of the Generalized Inverse...

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3-D Displays

Portion of a time slice (top half) and vertical section (bottom half)

Cube display shaw in-line and crossline on slices and time slice on top
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Structure maps resulting from 2-D (left) and 3-D (right) surveys showing the additional detailed from the 3-D surveys

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3D Interactive Interpretation-Horizon tracking InterpretationManual (point or stream) tracking Good for consistent interpretation Automatic Relies on a zero-phase wavelet (tracking the maximum amplitude) Preferable for accurate amplitude analysis To identify correct reflection events, data are compared to borehole logs, synthetics, and VSPs

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3D Horizon Auto-tracking Auto-

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3-D Seismic Interpretation

a) Time slice

b) Interpretation based on 3-D time slice and well data

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