Seismic Prediction of Shallow Unconsolidated Sand in Deepwater Areas

Recently, shallow gas fields and hydrate-bearing sand in the deepwater area of the northern South China Sea have been successively discovered, and the accurate prediction of shallow sands is an important foundation. However, most of the current prediction methods are mainly for deep oil and gas reservoirs. Compared with those reservoirs with high degree of consolidation, shallow sandy reservoirs are loose and unconsolidated, whose geophysical characteristics are not well understood. This paper analyzes the logging data of shallow sandy reservoirs recovered in the South China Sea recently, which show that the sand content has a significant influence on Young’s modulus and Poisson’s ratio of the sediments. Therefore, this paper firstly constructs a new petrophysical model of unconsolidated strata targeting sandy content and qualitatively links the mineral composition and the elastic parameters of the shallow marine sediments and defines a new indicator for sandy content: the modified brittleness index (MBI). The effectiveness of MBI in predicting sandy content is then verified by measured well data. Based on pre-stack seismic inversion, the MBI is then inverted, which will identify the sandy deposits. The method proposed provides technical support for the subsequent shallow gas and hydrate exploration in the South China Sea.