CALIBRATION OF SEISMIC ATTRIBUTES FOR RESERVOIR CHARACTERIZATION

The project, ''Calibration of Seismic Attributes for Reservoir Calibration,'' is on schedule and making unplanned discoveries in addition to those intended when the project commenced. The discoveries, planned and unplanned, can be grouped into four classes: pitfalls to avoid in interpretation of seismic attributes; suggested workflows to follow in working with seismic attributes; new methods of calculating certain new attributes which we feel to be useful; and new theoretical approaches to certain petrophysical properties. We are using data from Wyoming, North Texas, South Texas, and the Gulf of Mexico offshore of Louisiana. These environments provide a diverse array of physical conditions and rock types, and a variety of interpretation methods to be applied to them. The Wyoming field is a very difficult one, including alternating layers of thin beds of coals, shales, and hard sandstones, and there may be an observable effect due to hydrocarbon production; we are using this field as the ''test'' of those techniques and methods we have developed or that we prefer based on our work on the other fields. Work on this field is still underway, although progressing nicely. The work on the public domain data sets in Texas, Boonsville and Stratton, is complete except for some minor additional processing steps, and final write-ups are underway. The work on the Gulf of Mexico field has been completed to the extent originally planned, but it has led us to such important new observations and discoveries that we have expanded our original scope to include time-lapse studies and petrophysical aspects of pressure changes; work on this expanded scope is continuing. Presentations have been made at professional-society meetings, company offices, consortium workshops, and university settings. Papers, including one review paper on ''Reservoir Geophysics'' have been published. Several Master's theses, which will spin off one or more published papers each, are in their final stages of preparation. One patent application is being considered by our university officials, based on a technique developed under this project. We have found that the data sets we have used (particularly the public-domain ones), and the observations we have made and the results we have obtained lend themselves very well to a set of tutorials and interactive guides to the use of seismic attributes. We have therefore requested a one-year extension (at no cost) to the project, to allow the careful development of a set of tutorials on the subject, which will probably be published on CDs