Recent Developments in Direct Detection of Oil and Gas:
Applications of Pattern Recognition

Abstract

For most of the twentieth century, exploration seismology had been focussed on imaging the structural features of the rock formations in the Earth's subsurface. In a sense, this "structural imaging" provides a powerful but indirect means for assisting the interpreters of seismic data in identifying sites with potentially commercial accumulations of oil and gas. In the last two decades, new tools have been developed for direct detection of hydrocarbons. Coupled with the indirect information provided by structural imaging, these new tools can significantly increase the probability of success associated with a given exploration project. One of the most important new tools for direct detection of hydrocarbons is the so-called Amplitude Variation with Offset (AVO) method. To understand this method, it is helpful to think of the seismic method as a way of taking a number of "snapshots" of the subsurface formations, taken at different angles. As the signature of hydrocarbon-saturated sandstones on these snapshots (i.e., their variation as a function of angle) tends to be different from the signatures of other kinds of rocks, careful analysis of these variations can be used to detect potentially hydrocarbon filled reservoirs. In this talk, we review this powerful AVO method, demonstrate how it can be viewed as a classic pattern recognition problem, and highlight some of the recent research results in this area.

Biography

Work:
1983-85: Scientific assistant - Kuwait University.
1991-present: Shell Oil Company

Research interests:
Statistical signal processing and pattern recognition with applications to oil and gas prospecting.

A list of Telecommunications and Signal Processing Seminars is available at from the ECE department Web pages under "Seminars". The Web address for the Telecommunications and Signal Processing Seminars is http://signal.ece.utexas.edu/seminars