 W-11: Gulf of Mexico Imaging Challenges: What Can Full Waveform Inversion Achieve? SEG 2012 Annual Meeting Technical Program
Date: Friday, 9 November 2012
Time: 8:30 am – 4:00 pm
Location: Mandalay Bay Convention Center, Room: Mandalay Bay Ballroom C
Organizers: Dimitri Bevc, Cengiz Esmersoy, and Partha Routh
E-mail Contact: dimitri.bevc@chevron.com
Through the support of the SEG Research Committee
Description
There continues to be a great deal of industry activity and interest in Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) because of its potential to generate accurate high resolution velocity models. Several case histories exist, but most of the more compelling results are in basins that are not dominated by salt tectonics, and are unlike the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). The objective of this workshop is to demonstrate and evaluate the current state-of-the-art of FWI technologies for high-resolution velocity modeling in complex salt environments, and discuss current and future R&D directions. Our aim is to look at FWI technology landscape in a different and hopefully interesting way. The all-day workshop is organized in two parts: - A morning session where participants will share the results of a blind GOM synthetic FWI exercise, including velocities and images, and will show some data based evaluation criteria such as data fit (amplitude and phase) and RTM gather flatness. In addition the organizers will present statistics on the accuracy of the results at some selected virtual well locations.
- An afternoon session where invited speakers will present case histories, experiences, and technology developments.
The morning session will focus on a 2D synthetic rather than 3D, to accelerate the process, to keep computational costs down, and to enable broader participation. The 2D model has the added benefit that more compute intensive real-earth physics can be added to the forward modeling, including fully-elastic propagation and attenuation. The model will include complex supersalt, salt, intra-salt, and sub-salt complexities representative of the deep water GOM; no tricks, and nothing you wouldn't find in the Gulf of Mexico. The workshop will benefit both researchers and practitioners by providing a venue to demonstrate velocity/FWI capabilities, discuss the benefits and areas of applications of FWI, and share experiences to build future capability and explore areas of new application. Attendees can expect to get an overview of FWI, including an assessment of current capability, and a picture of what can be expected from FWI in the GOM and similar environments, and where FWI might be most applicable. In addition, researchers will be able to calibrate their own efforts, and gain insights into the challenges of velocity model building and imaging in complex salt environments. |
