What is Seismic Inversion?
In Geophysics (primarily in Oil and Gas exploration and development), seismic inversion is the process of transforming seismic reflection data into a quantitative rock-property description of a reservoir. Seismic inversion may be pre- or post-stack, deterministic, random or geostatistical; it typically includes other reservoir measurements such as well logs and cores.
Geophysicists routinely perform seismic surveys to gather information about the geology of an oil or gas field. These surveys record sound waves which have travelled through the layers of rock and fluid in the earth. The amplitude and frequency of these waves can be estimated so that any side-lobe and tuning effects introduced by the wavelet may be removed.
Seismic data may be inspected and interpreted on its own without inversion, but this does not provide the most detailed view of the subsurface and can be misleading under certain conditions. Because of its efficiency and quality, most Oil and Gas companies now use seismic inversion to increase the resolution and reliability of the data and to improve estimation of rock properties including porosity and net pay.
Cegal and Seismic Inversion
Cegal and BP have jointly developed one of the most advanced Seismic Inversion algorithms available on the market, Blueback ODiSI. ODiSI (One Dimensional Stochastic Inversion) is a unique seismic inversion method that produces high quality reservoir property estimates associated with uncertainties.
Blueback ODiSI does not require any prior lateral constraints: the algorithm converges so that each trace can be inverted independently of its neighbors yet laterally continuity is still achieved.
The technology was originally developed by BP (Connolly & Hughes, 2013, 2014, 2016) while a Petrel version has been developed jointly by Cegal and BP.
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