Reservoir-oriented migrated seismic image improvement and poststack seismic inversion using well-seismic mistie

Abstract In seismic exploration of subsurface hydrocarbon reservoirs, migrated seismic images are the foundation of structural interpretation and subsequent seismic inversion for reservoir properties. Seismic events in migrated images can be mispositioned due to several factors, such as seismic velocity inaccuracy. The mispositioned events lead to poor well-seismic tie and degrade the accuracy of subsequent inversion and reservoir prediction. Particularly, the mistie can be quite obvious for the mid- and mature-phases of the reservoir development after many wells drilled. We propose using the information from mistie between seismic images and synthetic traces to improve the accuracy of migrated seismic images and thus inversion results. Our method includes three major steps: (1) calculate time shifts between the synthetic traces and the colocated seismic trace using the path-limited dynamic time warping algorithm, (2) compute the time-shift volume for the entire migrated image using the seismic-driven modeling approach based on the time-shift traces at the well locations, and (3) apply the time-shift volume to update the migrated image. The improved seismic volume can be used for further processing, such as seismic inversion, which makes the inversion results more consistent with seismic and well data. We apply our method to synthetic and field data sets. The results demonstrate that the updated seismic image has an improved seismic well tie and an improved inversion result. Our method indicates a venue for a better honor of seismic and well data in reservoir characterization.