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ACQUISITION
Elastic impedance
PATRICK CONNOLLY, BP Amoco, Houston, Texas, U.S.
I t is now commonplace for 3-D data sets to be processed erty of EI that the level decreases with increasing angle.
as partial offset volumes to exploit the AVO information At this well, the sands are predominantly class III and
in the data. However, there has been significant asymme- so have slightly higher amplitudes at 30 than at normal
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try in the way these volumes could be calibrated and incidence. This can be more clearly seen in Figure 2 in
inverted. The amplitudes of near-offset, or intercept, stacks which the EI log has been scaled to have approximately
relate to changes in acoustic impedance and can be tied to the same shale baseline as the AI log. When the sands are
well logs using synthetics based on acoustic impedance class II, a more dramatic difference is evident between the
(AI) or inverted, to some extent, back to AI using poststack AI and EI logs.
Coordinated by Guillaume Cambois
inversion algorithms. However, there have been no sim- The seismic data around Foinaven suffer from very
ple analogous processes for far-offset stacks. strong peg-leg multiples. Even after demultiple, the sig-
The symmetry can be largely restored using a function nal-to-noise ratio of the near-trace data is often poor, espe-
I call elastic impedance (EI). This is a generalization of cially from the class II events, whereas the far-offset data
acoustic impedance for variable incidence angle. EI pro- are generally of good quality. EI allows the well data to be
vides a consistent and absolute framework to calibrate tied directly to the high-angle seismic which can then be
and invert nonzero-offset seismic data just as AI does for calibrated and inverted without reference to the near off-
zero-offset data. EI, an approximation derived from a lin- sets.
earization of the Zoeppritz equations (Appendix, part 1), Figure 3 shows part of the EI(30) log from another
is accurate enough for widespread application. Foinaven well overlain on an inverted 30 angle stack. The
As might be expected, EI is a function of P-wave veloc- data were inverted using a constrained sparse spike algo-
ity, S-wave velocity, density, and incidence angle. To relate rithm for which the EI log provided the basis for the con-
EI to seismic, the stacked data must be some form of angle straints and was used to QC the result.
stack rather than a constant range of offsets. There are sev- An EI log provides an absolute frame of reference and
eral ways of constructing suitable data sets by either care- so can also calibrate the inverted data to any desired rock
ful mute design or by linear combination of intercept and property with which it correlates. In the case of Foinaven,
gradient functions. (Part 2 of the Appendix reviews these a strong correlation was found between EI(30) and hydro-
methods.) carbon pore volume, and this relationship was used to
EI was initially developed by BP in the early 1990s to estimate the in-place volumes for the field from the inverted
help exploration and development in the Atlantic Margins 30 seismic volume.
province, west of the Shetlands, where Tertiary reservoirs Figure 4 shows a section from the inverted 30 volume
are typified by class II and class III AVO responses. Figure used to design the trajectory of the first high-angle devel-
1 shows a suite of logs from the Foinaven discovery well opment well. The oil sands correlated closely with the
drilled in 1992. The 30 elastic-impedance log, EI(30), is areas of low elastic impedance. The EI volume was used
broadly similar in appearance to the acoustic-impedance to design the trajectories of all subsequent development
log although the absolute numbers are lower; it is a prop- wells.
Figure 1. Comparison of an AI curve with a 30 EI curve for the Foinaven discovery well 204/24a-2.
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The EI formula is an approximation and may not be between. This allows the user to construct as high an angle
applicable in all circumstances; however, the loss of accu- stack as is stable and then to calibrate or invert it using the
racy is easy to calculate and minimize (Appendix, part 3). equivalent EI log.
In most situations, more general seismic data quality issues Because of the difficulties and uncertainties of con-
and particularly uncertainty in the estimation of incidence structing angle stacks, a method of quality-controlling the
angle are probably larger than errors in the implied reflec- results using available well data is important. EI provides
tivity from the EI values. a simple mechanism to produce synthetic seismograms for
Estimating Poissons ratio from seismic data has variable incidence angle. A Vp term can be factored out of
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prompted much comment in the literature and was the sub- the EI expression and the remaining angle-dependent
ject of a workshop at SEGs 1998 Annual Meeting. One expression can be used in place of the density log in con-
approach is to invert a 90 angle stack (see part 2 of the ventional synthetics software (equation 1.3). The Vp log is
Appendix) which, in theory, has amplitudes that are then calibrated with a time-depth relationship in the usual
approximately proportional to changes in Poissons ratio. way.
However, the construction of quantitatively accurate Figure 5 shows near- and far-offset ties to a west of
Poissons ratio stacks is notoriously difficult because of sen- Shetlands well. There is much variation of amplitudes
sitivity to residual moveout and bandwidth variations.
EI can provide an optimum compromise. Part 4 of the
Appendix shows how one variant of EI has values equal
to AI at normal incidence and to (Vp/Vs)2 at 90 (this being
closely related to Poissons ratio) with a smooth transition
Figure 4. A section through the inverted 30 volume, showing the path of the first development well. The location
of oil-bearing sands encountered by the well correlates with the areas of low elastic impedance (yellow).
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with offset in this area, and the two angle stacks are quite of an AI and EI curve is often simpler to relate to the seis-
different. Despite this, both well ties are of good quality. mic response than, say, Vs or Poissons ratio logs. An exam-
A principal benefit of EI within BP has been its value ple is shown in Figure 6 that is a standard BP petrophysical
as a communication and integration tool. EI allows AVO display from the Gulf of Mexico.
information to be displayed in a way that can be under- With this type of data established within a petrophys-
stood more intuitively by nongeophysical specialists. It is ical database the EI concept can help with more general
easily incorporated into petrophysical systems allowing rock-property studies. Figure 7 shows AI/EI crossplots of
AVO information to be communicated throughout the data from 19 Gulf of Mexico wells for shales, brine, and
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earth-science community. EI can be used to display rock- oil sands. By measuring average impedance values we
property data, either from wireline or core measurements, can quickly estimate the AVO response of various lithol-
in a way that can be directly related to far-offset stacks. ogy combinations. This particular data set, for example,
Shear-wave data are now recorded routinely in many shows that the percentage increase in amplitude from 0-
wells so the calculation of, say, an EI(30) log within any 30 for a shale/brine sand interface (~18%) is almost exactly
petrophysical package is straightforward. The combination the same as for a shale/oil sand interface (~17%). So, for
Figure 5. Low- and high-angle synthetic ties for a west of Shetlands well. The left side of the display is a conven-
tional AI synthetic match to a 10 angle stack. The right side is a 30 EI-based synthetic tied to a 30 angle stack.
Figure 6. Standard petrophysical display for a Gulf of Mexico well (MC619-1). The two right tracks show the AI
and EI(30) curves. In this example, the upper sand would be expected to generate little response at normal
incidence and a tough-peak pair at far offsets.
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these data, AVO gradient would be a poor fluid indicator. In each case the normalized standard deviations of the
However, looking at average values only tells part EI(30) data are less than those of the AI data. The area of
of the story. Figure 8 shows simplified, Gaussian fre- overlap between the oil and brine-sand values at 30 is less
quency curves of the AI and EI distributions of the three than half that at normal incidence. I find that many data
lithologies. sets have this characteristic (i.e., that EI values are more
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Figure 7. AI against EI(30) crossplots of data from 10 Gulf of Mexico wells for shales (left), brine sands (center), and
oil sands (right). Average AI and EI values can be read from the histograms and from these reflection coefficients
for any lithology combination at normal and 30 incidence. These data show almost the same percentage increase in
amplitude for a shale/brine-sand interface as a shale/oil-sand interface.
Figure 8. Gaussian curves equivalent to the histograms of Figure 7 showing the distribution of AI and EI(30) values
for the three lithologies. The normalized standard deviations for the shale, brine-sand, and oil-sand AI data are
0.15, 0.12, and 0.11. They are 0.10, 0.08, and 0.09 for the EI data.
Figure 9. The relationship between oil saturation and AI (left) and EI(30) (right) from core sample measurements
from the Foinanven Field.
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uniform than AI values for a given lithology). This implies tion, using no specialist software and with minimal increase
that most forms of amplitude analysis would be less in effort. This allows for routine extraction of quantitative
ambiguous at higher incidence angles than lower. AVO information from large 3-D volumes. LE
Finally, an example of using EI to display the results
of core measurement data. The Foinaven Field is the sub- Acknowledgments: The examples are the work of many people. Id espe-
ject of a 4-D, time-lapse seismic experiment and various cially acknowledge and thank current and former BP Atlantic Margins
core sample measurements have been made to calibrate colleagues Mike Cooper, Dave Cowper, Robert Hanna, Mike Currie, and
the results. Figure 9 shows the relationship between oil sat- Dave Lynch and our joint venture partners Shell UK for support and
encouragement. Also Ed Meanley, Sue Raikes, Terry Redshaw, Stan
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uration, AI, and EI(30). Clearly, the far offsets are more sen- Davis, and Wayne Wendt for additional help and both Shell and BP
sitive to changing saturation than the near ones. Amoco for permission to publish this paper.
In summary EI is pragmatic technology. It allows at
least first-order AVO effects to be incorporated routinely Corresponding author: Patrick Connolly, connolpa@bp.com
into seismic and rock-property analysis and interpreta-
Appendix
(1.1)
where
Note that had we used only the first two terms of (1.1),
and where then the above and following expressions differ only by
changing the tan2 to sin2. We substitute again lnx for
x/x;
Call this function EI (elastic impedance), and use the alter- An alternative form, with a Vp term factored out, can be
native log derivation for reflectivity which is accurate for used for generating synthetics (see main text).
small to moderate changes in impedance;
(1.3)
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and amplitude. These are both potentially complex areas
but if we restrict ourselves to first-order approximations
then angle stacks can be calculated with little extra effort
beyond conventional stacking.
These approximations limit applicability to data for
which the two-term moveout and Dix equations are valid
and for which amplitudes are proportional to sin2, (where
is incidence angle). This effectively means layer-cake
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10000
15000
20000
25000
30000
35000
40000
10000
12000
14000
16000
5000
2000
4000
6000
8000
0
0
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two-way-time (ms)
two-way-time (ms)
Figure A2. A typical stacking velocity function and its Dix interval equivalent. From these and equation 2.1, an
outer 35 mute to exclude the nonlinear AVO is derived. Then, from equation 2.2, an inner-trace mute is calculated
to give an average stack angle of 25.
constant for the entire time series (or constant within any This expression can be used to calculate the rms level of
system in which absolute comparisons are being made). the error for the entire log. As an example, the error was
This reduces the accuracy of the derived reflectivity com- calculated for the 204/24a-2 data and is displayed in Figure
pared with that obtained directly from equation 1.1 for A3 as signal-to-noise for a range of K values.
which the Vs/Vp ratio can be set to be the average across This provides a mechanism to obtain the optimum K
each interface. Again substituting K for Vs2/Vp2, if K is value for any data set. In this example the signal-to-noise
the difference between the true local value and the of 12 should be more than adequate for most purposes.
constant value, then from equation 1.1 the error in the For comparison the signal-to-noise from ignoring AVO
reflection coefficient is and using an AI approximation is 1.3 which would be
unacceptable for quantitative analysis. In general errors
introduced by the EI approximation will probably be much
smaller than those arising from the estimation of incidence
(3.1) angle.
It is possible to derive a correction to an EI log such
that the derived reflectivity is accurate for a locally aver-
aged K value rather than the constant value. The correc-
tion is, however, recursive, dependent on the overburden
and hence loses the prime advantage of the EI function
that it depends only on instantaneous local properties. If
K is the locally averaged value and K is the constant value
the following expression is calculated for each sample.
(3.2)
R is the ratio of the correction for the (i-1)th sample to the
ith sample so the correction works by calculating the run-
ning sum of this expression and then multiplying the EI
values by this factor (Figure A4).
Figure A3. The ratio of the rms level of the R(30) 4) High-angle inversions. Both methods for constructing
reflectivity from (1.1) divided by the EI error term angle stacks (outlined in Appendix, part 2) are based on
from (3.1) for a range of K values for the 204/24a-2 the first order AVO equation whereas the EI derivation
data. The maximum signal-to-noise is about 12 and (Appendix, part 1) is based on the second-order equation.
corresponds to a K value of about 0.21. Below 30, this makes little difference, but if we wish to
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Figure A4. An example of the application of the EI correction (3.2) to the 204/24a-2 data. The effect of the correction
is small for this example.
(4.1)
Ive already shown that EI(0) = AI and from 4.1 we can
now see that if we let K = 0.25 then EI1(90) = (Vp/Vs)2. The
absolute levels of EI1(90) will depend on exactly which
value for K is being used but relative amplitudes should
always be approximately proportional to (Vp/Vs)2. And of
course (Vp/Vs)2 can be easily transformed into Poissons
ratio which in appearance is a very similar function.
Figure A5 shows a suite of EI 1 functions for the
204/24a-2 well with the gamma and log resistivity curves
for reference and showing comparisons with (Vp/Vs)2 and
Poissons ratio curves. The curve values have all been nor-
malized. The optimized K value of 0.21 was used for the
EI calculations, but the EI1(90) is almost identical to the
(Vp/Vs)2 curve.
EI 1 curves therefore provide a smooth transition
between AI and (Vp/Vs)2 functions. In principle a corre-
sponding angle stack could be constructed and inverted
for any desired angle but in practice these will become
increasingly unreliable at higher angles. The EI concept,
however, allows an optimum balance to be chosen.
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