Technology

 

 

In structural interpretation, notoriously time-consuming tasks include interpreting 3D salt boundaries, fault surfaces, canyon boundaries and highly faulted horizons.

 

In most standard interpretation systems, salt boundaries are knit together using multiple single z surfaces in an iterative and repetitive workflow to create the multi-z complex salt bodies. A surface is fit to these interpreted fault cuts, often requiring the use of separate software packages, and a tedious process of editing the picked grid and the surface then ensues to achieve a final salt interpretation. Fault surfaces are frequently interpreted in a similar manner – by creating a surface from fault cut picks on a sparse grid of inlines or crosslines. Traditional horizon autotrackers require so much input and editing on highly faulted horizons that the interpreter may find it more efficient to simply pick the entire horizon by hand. Interpreting canyon boundaries is also an entirely manual process in these interpretation systems.

 

Insight Earth Structure provides new workflows and processes, called voxel processing, to image the boundaries of salt bodies and canyons in 3D seismic volumes. Once these boundaries are imaged in the volume, the interpreter rapidly paints an initial 3D surface completely around the imaged boundary, and then shrinks the surface in 3D to the imaged salt or canyon boundary using Surface WrappingTM. Alternatively, the initial 3D surface could be painted everywhere inside the salt body or canyon and expanded or inflated to the imaged boundary.

 

Insight Earth creates a fault enhanced or fault probability attribute volume, and then provides techniques to automatically extract the entire 3D fault pattern in the volume. It also provides instantaneous interactive extraction of individual faults from the volume.

 

Highly faulted horizons are interpreted by conditioning the volume with voxel processing, and then using Surface DrapingTM to pick the entire horizon all at once.

 

 

Insight Earth Stratigraphy focuses on the problem of imaging and interpreting the boundary of elements of depositional systems.

 

In other interpretation systems, depositional systems are imaged on “stratal slices” that can be created near interpreted horizons by flattening the volume on a single interpreted horizon. The limitation of this approach is that horizontal slices through the flattened volume are free of structure, and represent stratal slices only near the interpreted horizon that is used for flattening.

 

Insight Earth Stratigraphy provides a process called Domain Transformation, which removes all 3D structural effects from a volume for any number of horizons simultaneously, creating an entire output volume in which every horizontal slice is a stratal slice – a paleodepositional surface. The transform properly configures differential sedimentation, differential compaction, unconformities (including angular), salt bodies, canyons, carbonate platforms, and can remove 3D fault displacements.

 

The resulting stratal volume is ideal for imaging all of the depositional systems in the volume. The boundaries of the depositional systems are imaged and then interpreted in 3D using Surface Wrapping. The interpreted boundaries are then inverse transformed and merged with the structural interpretation.

 

 

By working in 3D with complete surfaces at all stages of the process, the interpretation is accomplished in a fraction of the time, and represents the core data in much greater detail than any approaches commonly used in other systems today.