Characterization of small faults and fractures in a carbonate reservoir using waveform inversion, reverse time migration, and seismic attributes

Waveform tomography and reverse time migration were used to derive a high resolution seismic migrated section with walkaway VSP data from an oil field in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. A high resolution velocity model that correlates well with the sonic log was obtained from waveform tomography and used for reverse time migration. A specific workflow, based on dip estimate, structural conditioning, noise attenuation, similarity/coherency attributes and binary filtering was used for the extraction of faults and fractures from the reverse time migrated section. Complex networks of lineaments were obtained and interpreted using rose diagrams. The lineaments associated with large throw in seismic section correlate well with manually interpreted faults from seismic, and the dip angle of lineaments with little to no throw correlate with the dip angle of interpreted fractures from FMI data, thus suggesting they might be related to fracture zones or fracture corridors. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.