Volume
Interpretation
from Regional to Prospect Scale: on the Desktop!
Weatherill, Philip M.1, Mark
Stockwell2, Howard Chan2, Les Ruthven2, Paul
Xu2, Rick Palmer2, Charlie Huang2, Tom Holley2
(1) Shell International E&P, Houston, TX (2) Shell International E&P,
We describe why interpreters should be
making more use of volume interpretation
and vizualization now, enablers which
facilitate deployment of this technology on the desktop, and a case history of
applying these techniques within Shell.
Several trends have converged to yield a
powerful tool for the interpretation
of large
seismic
data
sets in 3D: 1)
Significantly improved graphics performance of recent workstations, 2)
Multi-gigabyte memory is available at reasonable cost, 3) Operating systems capable
of addressing large memory volumes, 4) High performance I/O capabilities,
including new formats, streamline input of
data
from disk, 5) Cost of disk
storage is now negligible in the price of an
interpretation
workstation, 6) New
and improved applications enable realistic
interpretation
workflows from
regional to the prospect scale.
Because of these improvements we have
reached a tipping point with volume interpretation
. Unfortunately, many
interpreters, overburdened with an ever-increasing workload, are likely unaware
at just how much the field has changed.
Deepwater offshore Brazil is an active
play for Shell. We recently implemented two volume interpretation
and
visualization projects over very large areas (10-20,000 sq km), on high-end
desktop workstations, to better integrate all
data
and knowledge with the aim
of deriving further exploration insights and reducing
interpretation
cycle-time.
This initiative has been successful.
Demonstrated benefits include visualization of entire petroleum systems and
faster regional mapping. All interpreters interrogating complex 3D problems who
wish to extract maximum insights from their datasets in short timeframes will
need to embrace the new volume interpretation
and visualization technologies.
AAPG Search and Discover Article #90063©2007 AAPG Annual Convention, Long Beach, California