3-D Surface Seismic Attribute and Prestack Impedance Inversion Characterization of the Red Fork Formation, Oklahoma USA

Del Moro, Yoryenys; Fernandez, Alfredo; Verma, Sumit; Marfurt, Kurt

While the Red Form Formation has been extensively explored and produced, there still remains a significant number of undiscovered resources. The parts of this play in Kansas and Colorado show low thermal maturity levels, have poorer reservoir quality and overall fewer sands than the parts of the play in Oklahoma and Texas and are therefore not projected to have as much resource potential. Historical data on major discoveries, individual well completions, and thermal maturity are used extensively in assessing this play. The main objective of this project is to apply simultaneous prestack impedance inversion and 3-D seismic attributes to discriminate lithologies and associate them to the defined incised valley fill channel stages of the Red Fork Formation in Oklahoma.

We use simultaneous prestack seismic impedance inversion calibrated to well log data to differentiate between porous and non-porous sand and shale channels in the Red Fork Formation in the Anadarko Basin. Such differentiation can then be used to define a workflow that can be applied to unexplored areas. We did not focus on predicting fluid content because the rocks are so well-consolidated that fluid prediction will be very difficult to achieve.

3-D seismic attributes such as edge-sensitive most positive and most negative curvature, coherence and Sobel filter similarity, combined with facies-sensitive spectral decomposition are used to highlight features not readily apparent on the seismic amplitude data to be able to improve the lithology discrimination analysis and characterize the incised valley fill channels in the Red Fork Formation based on the channel sinuosity. Previous models by Clement (1991) and Peyton et al. (1998) show a total of five stages, while we are able to add a sixth stage to their model.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90163©2013AAPG 2013 Annual Convention and Exhibition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 19-22, 2013