Join the OpendTect ML Discord communityInterpretation Services
HorizonCube & Sequence Stratigraphy Interpretations
It is well known that there is a world-wide decrease of unexplored easy-to find structural traps. Consequently, we must turn our attention to subtle petroleum reservoirs such as stratigraphic traps, i.e. traps that are formed as a result of lateral and vertical variations in the thickness, texture, porosity or lithology of the reservoir rock.
Examples of this type of trap are an unconformity trap, a lens trap and a reef trap. These subtle traps require an overall more detailed analysis, thus increasing the need to extract more information from seismic data. One of the tools at hand, seismic sequence stratigraphy, has proved to have a great predictive potential for lithology and consequently reservoir, source rock and seal potential.
dGB offers complete seismic sequence stratigraphic interpretation studies, that include:
- Chronostratigraphic horizon tracking
- Wheeler transformed seismic data (2D and 3D)
- Full systems tracts interpretations
- Seismic facies mapping
- Attributes analysis for visualization of Paleo-geomorphological features
- Etc.
For a tailor made sequence stratigraphic study please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Seismic Attributes & Filtering
We use OpendTect and plugins in our service work to enhance seismic data and to extract and interpret seismic attributes. Our service work in this field includes among others: cleaning up seismic data by removing noise, sharpening faults, detecting fractures, increasing the vertical seismic resolution, enhancing subtle hydrocarbon anomalies, creating and analyzing AvO attributes and interpreting seismic patterns and objects.
dGB conducts exclusive, tailor made studies on behalf of international E&P companies and National Oil Companies. Studies typically involve integration of geological knowledge, well data and seismic data, for which we use OpendTect as well as 3rd party software products. The study objectives may vary from regional exploration (object detection, fluid migration history, sequence stratigraphy) to qualitative and quantitative interpretations to support understanding of reservoir distributions and properties.
Attribute analysis requires a geologic mind and a system that supports multi-volume, interactive analysis. That is what OpendTect is all about! You zoom in on your target. You calculate attributes on-the-fly. You test attribute parameters in movie-style fashion. You calculate attributes from attributes. You create your own attributes and filters using math and logic. In other words: the total number of attributes in OpendTect is unlimited. This gives you total freedom to use your full expertise. The commercial plugins to OpendTect give you even more power:
Seismic Attributes
Seismic Filters
Processing
For our R&D software users and users who occasionally require certain processing capabilities we created a job-deck builder for Madagascar, the Open Source processing system that is widely used in Academic circles. The Madagascar link supports IO to and from both packages ensuring a seamless integration.
Fluid Migration Path Interpretations
Many hydrocarbon producing basins in the world are dominated by vertical hydrocarbon migration. This hydrocarbon migration is often directly detected in the seismic record as zones of vertically aligned, chaotic, low energy data. Depending on their morphology we term these features gas chimneys, mud volcanoes, or gas clouds. In 1998, dGB and Statoil invented the Chimney Cube, a volume that has proved to be very useful in the study of petroleum systems. Since the first application dGB created hundreds of chimney cubes and published more than 50 technical papers on fluid migration, fault seal analysis and ranking prospects with seal and charge risks.
Chimney Atlas
The Chimney Atlas gives an overview of fluid migration path studies, condutcted by dGB and others. The altas contains geographically referenced links to videos, papers, books, posters and annotated PowerPoint presentations that can serve as analogs for other studies. We invite everyone with peer-reviewed papers to share this information via this free platform. Please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you have something to add.
Services
We use our chimney expertise to help clients rank their prospects and to perform fault seal analysis. Prospect ranking is based on classifying chimneys and calibration against our database of analogs. We classify chimneys on appearance and on spatial relationships between chimneys, faults and traps. In fault seal analysis we compare chimney cubes with fault (similarity) cubes. The output is a qualitative measure of fault leakage.
Quantitative Interpretations
Predicting rock properties from seismic data is one of the pillars of dGB. In 1995 we started out as a QI (Quantitative Interpretation) specialist company offering unique work flows based on stochastic forward modeling of pseudo-wells and non-linear (neural network-based) predictions. Since then we have broadened our services portfolio considerably, but our passion for QI projects remains. We offer rock-physics analysis, AvO attribute analysis, forward modeling of synthetic data, seismic inversion products, rock-property predictions and integrated interpretation services.
OpendTect Inversion & Rock Physics Bundle is the main toolkit we use in these projects. This bundle provides a wide range of tools for innovative QI work. A unique work flow is the HitCube inversion approach supported in SynthRock. In this work flow a stochastic simulator generates thousands of 1D models (pseudo-wells). In a HitCube run the synthetics of these pseudo-wells are cross-matched against the real seismic data. This results in 3D probability (expectation & standard deviation) volumes of rock-properties of interest.
Understanding geology is the key to drilling successful wells. This means that one needs to gain understanding in the 3D distribution of lithologies, rock properties and fluid fill in the subsurface. Predicting these distributions from 3D seismic data with control points at well locations is the current industry standard. At dGB we take reservoir prediction a step further by looking beyond the numbers and use geological models to improve our prediction. Also, with the use of neural networks, we avoid using oversimplified linear models which can not accurately describe most rock property relations.
Overview of reservoir characterization services:
Well Modeling Products
- Log-log predictions
- Lithology clustering
- Pattern analysis (Markov chain)
- Sensitivity modeling
- Stochastic pseudo-well modeling
- AVO analysis, rock physics.
Inversion Products
- HitCube
- Seismic Spectral Blueing
- Clustered/classified seismic
- (Extended Elastic) Impedance inversion
- HorizonCube-based geo-models
- HorizonCube-based low frequency models
- Rock properties prediction.
Additional Services
- Full 3D calibration to well data (amplitude and depth mapping)
- 4D time-lapse studies (monitoring of saturation changes).
