Please Join us for our March Technical Luncheon. To be held at SLB's offices in Addison.

Thank you to our speaker and our sponsors for hosting the event. Lunch to be served at 11:30 and the talk to begin at Noon. 

Abstract:

Using probabilistic inversion to understand a stratigraphic sequence in a poorly resolved unconventional reservoir.

Evan Mutual

Probabilistic inversion approaches provide a framework for encoding stratigraphic sequences into inverse problems. As a consequence, this inversion approach can provide not only a comprehension of the distribution of extremely slight changes in facies type, but also a probabilistic understanding of the transition between stratigraphic subunits. The inversion's flexible geologic framework allows us to adjust facies definitions so that we may ask more complicated and specialized questions during the inverse process. In particular, unconventional resource plays are characterized by subtle lithofacies changes with mineralogical variations of 10% and porosity variations of less than 3%, resulting in a high degree of overlap in elastic property space. In this case study, we show how they can be separated if we supplement the problem with auxiliary data such as facies thickness, transition statistics, and stratigraphic ordering rules. As a result, it is possible to discern both lithofacies variability and internal stratigraphic structures even when seismic resolution is restricted and seismic noise levels are high.

Speaker Bio:

Evan Mutual has ten years of related work experience in advanced seismic and rock physics analysis. He has worked with on-shore and off-shore seismic data from around the world in a wide array of geologic settings. He helped establish the Qeye Calgary office and helped it grow from 2 people to over 10. Through his work he has helped develop workflows for effective stress characterization, anisotropy analysis, joint inversions and most recently a workflow for the integration of seismic data and reservoir model or geomodel data. Evan has a bachelors and masters degree in Geophysics from University of Calgary and was a member of the CREWES consortium.