Co-authors: Imtiaz Ahmed, Andrew Brenders, Joe Dellinger, John Etgen and Scott Michell; BP America

BP recently acquired wide-offset ocean-bottom-node data with conventional airguns over the Atlantis Field in the deep-water Gulf of Mexico. Careful consideration during the acquisition was rewarded by recording usable signal down to a lower frequency and wider offset than previously achieved. Full-waveform inversion was then applied to the resulting dataset. The resulting velocity model was then used, unmodified, to reverse time migrate the seismic data. The result was the production of some of the best sub-salt images ever seen at Atlantis. Furthermore, the FWI velocity model clearly revealed several major interpretation errors in the legacy salt model despite many rounds of top-down salt model building, and thus the FWI result also offered an excellent basis for updating the conventional salt-model-building workflow. These results demonstrated that with appropriate seismic data to support it, FWI might offer a paradigm shift in model building and imaging in areas of complex salt.

Speaker Biography:  XuKai Shen, BP America
Xukai Shen joined BP America in Houston, TX in 2015 as a geophysicist with focus on seismic imaging R&D and processing projects. He worked closely with the R&D teams and the processing teams to deliver high-end marine images with a variety of challenges such as salt, anisotropy and multiples. Prior to joining BP Shen obtained a Ph.D. degree in Geophysics at Stanford.