Seismic Traveltime Tomography Applied to Data from Miranga Field, Reconcavo Basin, Brazil

Abstract:

The growing global demand for hydrocarbons has tested the limits of oil exploration and exploitation technologies. Within the seismic methods, tomography is an alternative for the high resolution characterization of reservoirs, enabling a more efficient recovery of new as well as mature fields. In this work, seismic traveltime tomography in the transmission mode was applied to real data from the Miranga Field, Reconcavo Basin, State of Bahia, Brazil. This basin represents a landmark of oil exploration in Brazil and has been intensively studied since the 1950s. Today, the Reconcavo Basin is still the principal oil producer in the State of Bahia, but there is a demand for new technologies, especially for mature fields, to improve hydrocarbon recovery. The objective is to estimate the two-dimensional velocity distribution in the region between the two wells. We have used linearized inversion through the Levenberg-Marquardt scheme. The input data in the system are the traveltimes between the sources and the receivers and the distances propagated by each ray connecting such sources and receivers. Both inputs are provided through acoustic forward modeling. The conjugate gradient algorithm with regularization through derivative matrices was used as an inverse procedure. The tomographic inversion is an ill-posed problem because the existence, uniqueness and stability conditions are not completely satisfied. The linear system is regularized by derivative matrices derived to minimize the instability. This regularization procedure has a crucially important parameter called regularization parameter lambda. For the selection of lambda we used L-curve and Theta-curve. The estimated tomograms were consistent with previous geological knowledge of the area and the P-wave velocity range was consistent. The results showed that traveltime tomography is feasible for the characterization of reservoirs with a high rate of vertical change, similar to the Miranga Field.