Saudi Aramco will share advances in the geophysical value chain, presenting nearly 20 technical papers during the 85th Annual Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) International Exposition and Annual Meeting in New Orleans. This year’s contributions represent developments from all of Saudi Aramco’s worldwide upstream research centers, including those in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; Beijing; Delft, the Netherlands; and Houston.

For decades, Saudi Aramco researchers have been making substantial contributions to geophysics. Taking a multidisciplinary research approach to developing technical solutions for upstream challenges, the company has expanded its global R&D network as it aims to increase the discovery of oil and gas reserves while improving recovery rates. Saudi Aramco’s upstream geophysical research is founded on three major initiatives: bringing geophysics closer to the reservoir to improve data fidelity and resolution; introducing automation into the seismic value chain to speed acquisition, reduce costs and improve processing and interpretation turnaround time; and multiphysics. These high-impact R&D initiatives have become topics of industry discussion and have opened new frontiers in geophysics research.

“We are seeing more integration of geomechanics, geology, geophysics and reservoir simulation,” said Tim Keho, senior geophysical consultant and head of the geophysics team at Saudi Aramco’s Houston research facility.

Addressing the challenges of seismic monitoring on land is a common theme in many of Saudi Aramco’s SEG papers. Keho said poor image quality and poor repeatability caused by near-surface variations are primary challenges limiting wider application of seismic monitoring on land.

Three of the monitoring papers examine double time-difference inversion, 4-D image warping and interferometry redatuming technologies, all of which are designed to reduce the impact of time-lapse seismic noise. “Virtual source redatuming improves image quality and repeatability by relocation of surface sources below the complex near surface to locations coincident with buried receivers,” Keho said. Moreover, a new concept for reservoir characterization and monitoring will be discussed in the paper “Bring geophysics closer to the reservoir: a new paradigm in reservoir characterization and monitoring,” presented by Andrey Bakulin.

Other technical papers address efficiency in imaging and inversion and introduce new technologies such as super-resolution stacking using concepts from compressive sensing and techniques to improve imaging methodologies such as reverse time migration with a new idea called de-primary to reduce depth-imaging artifacts.

Several papers will highlight research in low-rank methods to incorporate data interpolation and de-noising within imaging algorithms and exploring multiscale concepts to improve the speed of finite element modeling. The nonseismic research group within Saudi Aramco’s geophysics technology team recently introduced electromagnetic (EM) methods for onshore waterfront monitoring and tested new sensor technologies. In-house EM, gravity and seismic modeling codes comprise the engine for deployment of advanced joint-inversion algorithms critical for integrating nonseismic with conventional seismic data.