Seismology refers to the scientific study of earthquakes and seismic waves, the waves of energy that travels through the layers of the Earth. Seismic waves are studied by geophysicists to collect seismic data of the structure of the subsurface.
In oil and gas exploration, seismic data are collected to get detailed information on the geophysical structure of an oil and gas field. Seismic data can help locate oil reserves and improve the accuracy of drilling and well placement, limiting the environmental impact of the operations.
Seismic data could be interpreted on its own or, to get a more detailed view of the subsurface, the process of seismic inversion could be applied to transform the data into a quantitative rock-property description of a reservoir.
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 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.
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.