High Resolution 3D Seismic for Mapping of Subsurface Karsting of Carbonate

Jianxun Zhao*, Xukui Feng, Shujun Li, Shengming Wen, Yan Gao, Bureau of Geophysical Prospecting, China National Petroleum Corporation, P. O. Box 11-3, Zhuozhou, Hebei, Peoples Republic of China, 072750 Abstract
The existing geological and well data show there are plentiful karsting carbonate in Ordovician formation in LN Depression of Tarim Basin, but the old seismic data was not adequate for karst mapping because of the low resolution. In order to investigate the possibility of buried hill reservoir in the area, a high-resolution 3D survey in Sangtamu Block was carried out. The purpose was to map the detailed features of the karsting and provide ideal location for drilling. Both acquisition and processing were emphasized on high temporal resolution based on high S/N ratio. The acquisition parameters were chosen to adopt single well, small charge, 1 ms sampling, 20x20 m cell size and 24 fold of coverage. High resolution full 3D RAP processing was performed, and the final section displayed high quality with dominate frequency of 48 Hz, laying a good foundation for karsting interpretation. Combined with the available geological and petrophysical data, the structure interpretation and reservoir characterization with palaeotectonics and palaeogeography study were carried out for better understanding of karsting development. By analyzing the karsting features and the surrounding environment, a number of drilling locations were selected and all successful. Among them, well LG9 and LG15 gave the initial production of 228 ton and 608 ton a day respectively. The integrated 3D project added 80 million tons of reserves to the oilfield.

Introduction
The carbonate is ideal reservoir rock because of its high porosity. Statistics show more than half of the proven oil reserves in the world are in carbonate reservoir. The existing geological and well data show there are plentiful karsting carbonate in Ordovician formation in LN Depression of Tarim Basin, the surrounding rock has good generation condition, while the upper rock can be good cap, but the old seismic data is not adequate for karst mapping because of the low resolution. In order to investigate the possibility of buried hill reservoir in the area, a high-resolution 3D survey in Sangtamu Block was carried out. The purpose is to map the detailed features of karsting and provide ideal location for drilling. The Sangtamu 3D, with the total size of 457 km2, was designed on the central location of LN Karsting High. The acquisition was emphasized on high temporal resolution with high S/N ratio. After analyzing the experiment data, the acquisition parameters were chosen to adopt 6 line by 24 shot layout, single well of 6 m, small charge of 2-3kg, 1 ms sampling, 20x20 m cell size and 24 fold of coverage. The onsite processing section shown good quality with the dominant frequency of 40 Hz. The high-resolution full 3D RAP processing was performed with IBM/OMEGA/GRISYS facility. The key techniques applied for the processing are: Multi-Domain Prestack Noise Attenuation, 3D Residual Statics, Cascaded DCON of SCD plus Predictive DCON, Interactive VELAN, 3D DMO, Cascaded Migration, etc. The final section displayed high quality with dominant frequency of 48 Hz, laying a good foundation for karsting interpretation. Under the guideline of modern karstology and combined with the available geological and petrophysical data, the structure interpretation and reservoir characterization with palaeotectonics and palaeogeography study were carried out for better understanding of karsting development. The major steps and techniques include: karst calibration, top karst mapping, inside karst interpretation, seismic attribute analysis, 3D visualization and comprehensive evaluation. By analyzing the karsting development and the surrounding environment, a number of drilling locations were selected and all successful. Among them, well LG9 and LG15 gave the initial production of 228 tons and 608 tons a day respectively. The Sangtamu project added 80 million tons of reserves to the oilfield.

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Data Acquisition
Tarim Basin is the largest sedimentary basin in China with the total size of 560,000 km2. The existing geological and well data show there are plentiful karsting carbonate in Ordovician formation in LN Depression of the Basin, the surrounding rock has good generation condition, while the upper rock can be good cap, but the old seismic data was not adequate for karst mapping because of the low resolution. In order to investigate the possibility of buried hill reservoir in the area, a high-resolution 3D survey in Sangtamu Block was carried out. The purpose was to map the detailed features of karsting and provide ideal location for drilling. The Sangtamu 3D, with the total size of 457 and full fold size of 245 km2, was designed on the central location of LN Karsting High. The topography is partly low sand tune and partly season swamp, with total elevation changing within 30 m. To fit the purpose, the acquisition was emphasized on high temporal resolution with high S/N ratio. Based on the plentiful field test, the acquisition parameters were chosen to adopt 6 line by 24 shot swath layout, with receiver line interval of 320 m, shot line interval of 40 m, group interval of 40 m, shot interval of 520 m; the total receiving channel is 1248(6x208), and the spread pattern is 4140-20-0-20-4140 m. To guarantee the high temporal resolution, the source was chosen single well of 6 m, small charge of 2-3kg, and the sampling rate was set 1 ms. Using this layout, 29 swathes and 19863 shots were acquired and gained 20x20 m cell size with 24 fold of coverage. There are totally 1408 inlines from 43 to 1450,and 936 crosslines from 193 to 1128. The on-site processing section shown good quality with the dominant frequency of 40 Hz. Figure 1 shows the coverage distribution.

Figure 1. The coverage distribution.

Processing Strategy
The high-resolution full 3D RAP processing was performed with IBM/OMEGA/GRISYS facility. The key techniques applied for the processing are: Multi-Domain Prestack Noise Attenuation, 3D Residual Statics, Cascaded DCON of SCD plus Predictive DCON, Interactive VELAN, 3D DMO, Cascaded Migration, etc. The final section displayed high quality with dominant frequency of 48 Hz, laying a good foundation for karsting interpretation.

Pre Stack Noise Attenuation

Zone Anomaly Process was applied to adjust for anomalous amplitudes. This program computes statistics for each trace and applies scalars to adjust each trace in a surface consistent manner. Noisy parts of few traces still appeared on stacks plotted with relative amplitude, which necessitated running ZAP again. This second run was post surface consistent scaling and zero phase deconvolution. The surface consistent amplitude scaling is designed to balance amplitudes within a window in a surface-consistent manner. It uses the Gauss-Seidel decomposition method to compute the scalars.

For this data, three terms (source, detector and offset) were estimated but only the source and detector terms were applied.

Cascaded Deconvolution
Trace to trace and surface consistent deconvolution were tested with best results achieved by using surface consistent deconvolution followed by Predictive Disconsolation. Surface consistent deconvolution provides a more stable deconvolution operator design in areas of variable data noise. SCD decomposes picks (auto correlations) for each trace into shot and receiver spectral components with a Gauss-Seidel approach. The process consists of 3 steps: surface-consistent spectral analysis, surface-consistent spectral decomposition into shot, receiver, midpoint and offset, design and apply minimum phase operators to deconvolve each trace in a surface consistent manner. For this data only the shot and receiver components were computed and applied. Figure 2 show the raw stacking section and the same section after noise attenuation and cascaded deconvolution, both S/N ratio and resolution were improved significantly.

Figure 2. Raw stacking section (left) and the same section after noise attenuation and cascaded deconvolution (right).

3D Residual Statics
Two passes of 3D residual statics were run on the Sangtamu 3D survey. The first pass was run after surface consistent deconvolution and preliminary velocity analysis on a one square km grid. The second pass of residual statics was run following the application of the 1st pass and re-picking of the velocity field. Both NMO corrected CMP gathers and 512 ms AGC gain were applied in order to precondition the data for cross-correlation and static picking. Static time deviations and quality factors are derived from the NMO corrected 3D volume. Each trace within a gather is cross-correlated (separately) against a model to determine a static deviation for the trace. It is further improved by applying the derived static deviations to the traces in the gathers before creating the model for the second pass. The time deviations calculated by the Cross-correlation Picker are then decomposed in a 3D manner into source and receiver static components. The Gauss-Seidel iterative technique is used, whereby statistics from all sources and receivers and used to derive a surface consistent 3D residual static solution. In order to prevent cross-line decoupling due to acquisition geometry, a structural smoothing filter is applied during the process. The resulting statics are output into residual source and receiver static files. These are updated into all trace headers on the 3D volume. The above descriptions also apply to the second pass of residual statics. The same basic shift limits were used for the second pass. The same is true for the model and window specifications. Actually, there is no more room of improvement after second iteration.

3D Dip MoveOut
Dip move-out or partial pre-stack migration is performed on move-out corrected CMP data within the shot to receiver plane. It is a wave theoretical approach that converts NMO corrected data recorded at

non zero offset to true zero offset independent of the dips present in the data. The benefit of DMO is to correct for different apparent move-out velocities for dipping and non-dipping reflections. Conventional NMO application and stacking are based on the assumption that the earth consists only of horizontal layers. When dipping events or diffractions are present the theory breaks down for two reasons: (1) For finite offsets in common midpoint data the true reflection point is not associated with the midpoint. (2) Stacking velocities are dip dependent. After application of DMO, dipping events are moved to their true reflection points and stacking velocities become independent of dip. As the data quality is relatively good, the Progressive DMO other than common offset DMO was employed for this particular data set. Figure 3 shows the conventional stacking section (above) and DMO stacking section (below) comparison, both the diffraction and fault plane reflection were imaged much better with DMO stacking.

Figure 3. Conventional stacking section (above) and DMO stacking section (below).

Cascaded Migration
Residual Migration was adopted since it is a technique which has gained acceptance within the industry, particularly for the migration of 3-D data. The process utilizes two migration algorithms, the Extended Stolt and Finite Difference, using both algorithms to their fullest advantage. The first pass of migration is made using Extended Stolt, with minimum and vertically smooth velocity function. This step partially migrates all of the input data to the lowest velocity found in the prospect. The Stolt migration was done after DMO Stacks, followed by a 2 pass residual migration using the Finite Difference methods. The variations in the migration velocity field are handled in the Finite Difference step. This method takes advantage of the speed and accuracy of the single-pass Stolt and maintains the ability to handle fairly complex velocity variations. I

Figure 4. Conventional 3D migration (1992) and high-resolution 3D migration (2001) comparison.

It is the residual Finite Difference migration process that gives the product its flexibility. Different migration velocity fields can be evaluated cost effectively by rerunning the Finite Difference migration steps at a fraction of the cost of re-migration the full volume from scratch. All the velocity variations to be tested are in the residual field, the bulk of the migration having been done in the Stolt step. Figure 4 shows the conventional 3D migration and high-resolution 3D migration comparison, the later displays the karst features much more clearly than the former.

Interpretation and the results

High-resolution acquisition and full 3D data processing made the seismic data adequate for mapping of subsurface karsting. Under the guideline of modern karstology and combined with the available geological and petrophysical data, the structure interpretation and reservoir characterization with palaeotectonics and palaeogeography study were carried out for better understanding of karsting development. The major steps and techniques include: karst calibration, top karst mapping, inside karst interpretation, 3D visualization, seismic attribute analysis and comprehensive evaluation. By analyzing the karsting development and the surrounding environment, a number of drilling locations were selected and all successful. Among them, well LG9 and LG15 gave the initial production of 228 tons and 608 tons a day respectively. The Sangtamu project added 80 million tons of oil reserves to the oilfield.

karst calibration
Calibration is the first and most important step for karst interpretation. To perform the karst calibration accurately, well log data was first analyzed for karst cavities and fractures, then the synthetic was produced to calibrate the real seismic data, finally, the forward modeling was performed in order to verify the interpretation. To have a better understanding of the seismic data, interpreters were involved through out the data processing. The drilling data shows that P wave velocity in carbonate is around 5500 m/s, the carbonate density is about 2.5 g/cm3; while the P wave velocity of the fluid in solution cave is around 1500 m/s, the fluid density is about 1 g/cm3, therefore, there is a large reflectivity from the cave wall, around 0.8. If considering the cave as a geological anomaly, its equivalent reflectivity R can be expressed as follow:

R =

[(1 r ) + 4r
2 2

2r sin 2h
2

sin 2 2h

12

Where h is the elevation difference between top and bottom of the cave, r is the reflectivity of the top and the bottom, (=vf/f) is the wave length of seismic wave traveling in fluid, vf is the fluid velocity, f is the frequency. At the karsting surface, the reflectivity is relatively smaller due to the severe erosion, thus producing weak seismic response on the section. On the other hand, the inside karsting cave has large reflectivity, therefore having strong seismic amplitude on the section. These two points have been proven by both synthetic and real data, and have been used as the general rules for karsting surface and karsting cave interpretation.

Top karst and Inside karst interpretation

Based on the accurate calibration, the karsting surface can be mapped first. The technologies employed for this purpose involves fine grid mapping, horizon visualization, coherent cube and full 3D interpretation. As a result, three kinds of maps can be output from this stage, they are: horizon visualization map, horizon contour map and coherent cube. The inside karst interpretation was performed after karst calibration and top karst mapping. The main technologies applied in this step were karst cavity and fracture interpretation, 3D visualization, full 3D correlation and karst phasing. It is relatively easier for inside karsting interpretation after finishing the

above-mentioned two steps, since the inside cave corresponds to strong amplitude and usually located 20 ms below the karsting top. Both karst profile and horizon map can be output from this stage.

3D visualization
3D visualization is a very powerful tool for karst mapping. It enables interpreter to look into 3D cube in different direction and/or at different angle. Starting from the calibration point, it is easy to trace the weak amplitude karst top and the strong amplitude inside cavities. Through 3D visualization, plenty of karsting features, like Fossil Ridge, Erosion Groove, Dolina, Under-Ground Channel and Flow, are clearly observable, see figure 5. The seismic event Tg5 is corresponding to the irregular karst top, 0 to 25 ms below Tg5 is erosional interval, 20 to 55 ms beneath is the interval of inside caves and fractures, while 60 to 90 ms below is the un-erosional basement of carbonate.

Figure 5. The seismic section showing different karst features.

Seismic attributes analysis

There are more than 20 kinds of seismic attributes produced during processing; the cross-correlations of different attributes were then produced for interpretation, since they are more meaningful than individual attribute. The results indicated that the amplitude attributes and energy attributes have large correlation coefficient. Combined with coherent cube, the absolute average amplitude of 20 ms window on conventional section can be indicator for karst top distribution, while RMS amplitude of 35 ms window on reflection strength section can be indicator for inside cave distribution.

Comprehensive evaluation and the results

To make the drilling decision, a comprehensive analysis for all kinds of information is needed, that is the analysis for oil generation, migration, reservoir, and cap and preservation condition. The main factors considered are the karst reservoir and surrounding features as well as the palaeotectonics, palaeogeography and palaeo-climatology changes. Balanced section restored the palaeotectonics and palaeogeography environment; the coherent cube displayed the palaeochannels and palaeofaults. The final results of comprehensive analysis are 3D structure map (Figure 6), palaeogeography map and inside karst distribution map. Based on the comprehensive interpretation of Sangtamu 3D data, 15 drilling location were proposed, 11 were accepted, and the successful rate is 100%. The three high producing wells are LG9 with initial production of 228 tons a day, LG12 with initial production of 216 tons a day, and LG15 with initial production of 608 tons a day. The Sangtamu 3D project increased oil area of 58 km2, and gas area of 2 3 94 km , added oil reserves of 80 million tons, and gas reserves of 31 billion m for the oilfield.

Figure 6. 3D structure map.

Conclusions
Sangtamu 3D is an integrated project of acquisition, processing and interpretation. Carefully designed high-resolution acquisition and full 3D processing guaranteed the data quality good enough for subsurface karst mapping, while the structure interpretation and reservoir characterization with the available geological and petrophysical data provided clear picture of karsting features of low Ordovician carbonate formation as well as karsting reservoirs and the surrounding environment. As a result, 15 drilling location were proposed, 11 were accepted, the successful rate was 100%. The Sangtamu project added 80 million tons of oil reserves and 31 billion m3 gas reserves for the oilfield. To help the oilfield manage and monitor the development, a new time-lapse 3D is under consideration.

References
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