NEW LOCATION this Month
Hilcorp
1111 Travis St., RM 9.327 - Old Ocean
Houston, TX   77002

Meeting Time: 11:00 to 1:00 pm
Registration Begins at 11:00
Lunch Served at 11:30
Presentation starts at Noon

NOTE: You Must Be Logged In to Register.

Speaker: Wilson Ibanez, Schlumberger

In the recently opened exploration frontier area of the deep-water Salina Del Istmo Basin, Southern Gulf of Mexico, we successfully applied a multi-physics workflow to integrate wide-azimuth seismic and potential field data.

In areas of poor signal-to-noise ratio, subtlety and variation in structural style due to salt kinematics and deep-seated thrusting, impose challenges for seismic imaging. High-velocity (impedance) contrasts at the interfaces between salt and carbonate rafts within the background sediments result in strong reflection and refraction at small angles of incidence, diffractions with complex wave patterns, and lack of illumination near and below these features. This creates high noise levels in the seismic image, resulting in high uncertainty in the salt interpretation. To reduce the uncertainties of salt interpretation, a multiphysics workflow is devised to integrate gravity data with the seismic measurements.

The multi-physics workflow employs a jointly collected suite of wide-azimuth, long-offset, broadband seismic data and potential field data. The process consists of conventional processing steps to enhance the salt related signal and a full 3D seismogravity modeling. Velocity model building, petrophysical link estimation for domain conversion and gravity forward modeling are hence used to interactively assess the scenario testing.

The integrated geophysical imaging enables definition of a better-constrained earth model of velocity and density distributions with improved geometries and reduced uncertainties.

Speaker Biography: Wilson Ibanez, Schlumberger 
Wilson Ibanez started his career in the oil & gas industry in 2008. He initially joined Ecopetrol for three years where his primary research interest was seismic anisotropy and velocity model building. He then moved to Saudi Arabia where he joined the Seismic Wave Analysis Research Group at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Wilson earned his Master’s degree in Earth Science at KAUST in 2013, where in collaboration with Professor Tariq Alkhalifah, he completed his research on Effective orthorhombic anisotropic models for wavefield extrapolation.

After completing his Master’s Degree, Wilson joined the Earth Modeling Geoscientist group at Schlumberger in 2013. Since then he has focused his attention on testing and applying state of the art Earth Model Building workflows, including but not limited to, advanced full waveform inversion techniques and seismic tomography integrated with geology, borehole data, rock physics, and potential fields.

His recent work has been focused on applying and integrating non-seismic methods to the depth imaging workflows, allowing him to build a cycle of iterative model building updates that lead to better seismic imaging results and a more reliable prospect evaluation for his clients.

Price List: