3D, 9C Seismic Modeling and Inversion of Weyburn Field Data

Inversion of 3D, 9C wide azimuth vertical seismic profiling (VSP) data from the Weyburn Field for 21 independent elastic tensor elements was performed based on the Christoffel equation, using slowness and polarization vectors measured from field data. To check the ability of the resulting elastic tensor to account for the observed data, simulation of the 3C particle velocity seismograms was done using eighth-order, staggered-grid, finite-differencing with the elastic tensor as input. The inversion and forward modeling results were consistent with the anisotropic symmetry of the Weyburn Field being orthorhombic. It was dominated by a very strong, tranverse isotropy with a vertical symmetry axis, superimposed with minor near-vertical fractures with azimuth ∼55° from the inline direction. The predicted synthetic seismograms were very similar to the field VSP data. The examples defined and provided a validation of a complete workflow to recover an elastic tensor from 9C data. The number and values of the nonzero tensor elements identified the anisotropic symmetry present in the neighborhood of a 3C borehole geophone. Computation of parameter correlation matrices allowed evaluation of solution quality through relative parameter independence. © 2012 Society of Exploration Geophysicists.