Improved estimation of elastic attributes from prestack seismic data for reservoir characterization

Seismic derivable elastic attributes, e.g., elastic impedance, lambda-rho, mu-rho, and Poisson impedance (PI), are routinely being used for reservoir characterization practice. These attributes could be derived from inverted V P, V S, and density, and usually indicate high sensitivity to reservoir lithology and fluid. Due to the high sensitivity of such elastic attributes, errors or measurement noise associated with the acquisition, processing, and inversion of prestack seismic data will propagate through the inversion products, and will lead to even larger errors in the computed attributes. To solve this problem, we have developed a two-step cascade workflow that combines linear inversion and nonlinear optimization techniques for the improved estimation of elastic attributes and better prediction and delineation of reservoir lithology and fluids. The linear inversion in the first step is an inversion scheme with a sparseness assumption, based on L1-norm regularization. This step is used to select the major reflective layer locations, followed in the second step by a nonlinear optimization process with the predefined layer structure. The combination of these two procedures produces a reasonable blocky earth model with consistent elastic properties, including the ones that are sensitive to reservoir lithology and fluid change, and thus provides an accurate approach for seismic reservoir characterization. Using PI, as one of the target elastic attributes, as an example, this workflow has been successfully applied to synthetic and field data examples. The results indicate that our workflow improves the estimation of elastic attributes from the noisy prestack seismic data and may be used for the identification of the reservoir lithology and fluid.