Fault geometric and seismic attributes

The fault geometric and seismic attributes project ended in February 2018. We have successfully fulfilled all the milestones and are proud of the good results. Without the financial support from the Norwegian Research Council through Petromaks2 and NORRUSS programs it was impossible to conduct the project. This successful project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between geoscientists and mathematicians from Uni Research CIPR (Norway), University of Oslo, and the Trofimuk Institute of Petroleum Geology and Geophysics, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk (Russia). In this project, fault geometric attributes were studied through analysis of fault data from outcrop and seismic data. Utilizing fault seismic attributes through our developed workflows we have imaged faults beyond seismic resolution. In total, forty 3D seismic surveys from the Norwegian Barents Sea have been used in our seismic attributes database. Analysis of fault seismic attribute volumes provides a unique technique to study three dimensional fault geometries. We have also studied details of fault zone and its internal structure on the outcrops in different lithology and geological settings. The outcrop studies include faults in siliciclastic (Utah, USA and Aberdeen, Scotland), carbonate (Maiella Mountain, Italy and Guadix-Baza Basin, Spain, and basement rocks of Norway. Inspired by the new understanding of fault geometry through seismic attributes and field studies, we have designed and run analogue experiments (collaboration with Oslo University) at Teclab, Utrecht University in order to further investigate the effect of lithology on fault geometry. By integrating data from different methods mentioned above, we have developed new scaling laws for fault geometric attributes using advanced statistical analysis of the data that were performed by our Russian partner. This has resulted in more reliable fault scaling laws that can be further used for evaluation of reservoirs models. The result could benefit petroleum exploration and production activities in the regions where faults are known to substantially influence both the reservoir quality and caprock integrity. The result of this project has been presented in both national and international conferences, a popular scientific article and several peer-reviewed journal papers. For more information, please see the following link: https://uni.no/nb/news/2017/08/02/styrker-3d-geologien-med-ny-teknikk/

The scientific goal of this project is to integrate outcrop-based knowledge of fault geometric attribues with seismic-based (seismic attribute analysis for fault identification) knowledge to improve methods of fault imaging and characterization in 3D seismic data as well as refining fault geometric scaling relations. The special focus will be placed on structurally complex areas of the Barents Sea. This is an interdisciplinary project which requires collaboration of structural geologists, applied mathematician, and exploration seismologists. Accurate imaging of faults is essential for hydrocarbon exploration/production and CO2 storage in potential reservoirs and therefore all these disciplines are supposed to benefit from the results of this integrated fault imaging and characterization project. Several 3D seismic surveys from the Norwegian Petrobank database (which will be available to CIPR) will be used to carry out advanced seismic attribute workflows to image faults. New multiattribute techniques will be tested and methods or algorithms will be developed to extract fault geometric attributes from seismic attributes. Seismic attributes illustrates faults which are not visible in conventional seismic data. There have been some attempts before to go beyond fault imaging on attributes and extract geometric information but they were all limited to mathematical algorithms and were not constrained by geological settings.The advantage of this project is to use the data and knowledge from the outcrop studies to verify the geometric information derived from seismic attributes.The validity of geometric detail extracted from small scale faults on seismic attributes (which are beyond conventional seismic resolution) will be verified by analogue modelling and field studies.The study will provide data from particular fault scales which are missing in the existing fault scaling data-base and will be subsequently used for new statistical investigations of fault scaling relation.