3D joint inversion using seismic data and marine controlled-source electromagnetic data for evaluating gas hydrate concentrations

Abstract:

For many decades, gas hydrates have been received great attention as a potential source of natural gas. Therefore, the detailed information of structures of buried gas hydrates and their concentrations are prerequisite for the production for the gas hydrate as a reliable source of alternate energy. Recently, for this reason, a lot of gas hydrate assessment methods have been proposed by many researchers. However, it is still necessary to establish as new method for the further improvement of the accuracy of the 3D gas hydrate distribution. In this study, we present a 3D joint inversion method that provides superior quantitative information of gas hydrate distributions using 3D seismic data obtained by ocean-bottom cable (OBC) and marine controlled-source electromagnetic (CSEM) data. To verify our inversion method, we first built the general 3D gas hydrate model containing vertical methane-flow pathways. With the described model, we generated synthetic 3D OBC data and marine CSEM data using finite element modeling algorithms, respectively. In the joint inversion process, to obtain the high-resolution volumetric P-wave velocity structure, we applied the 3D full waveform inversion algorithm to the acquired OBC data. After that, the obtained P-wave velocity model is used as the structure constraint to compute cross-gradients with the updated resistivity model in the EM inversion process. Finally, petrophysical relations were applied to estimate volumetric gas hydrate concentrations. The proposed joint inversion process makes possible to obtain more precise quantitative gas hydrate assessment than inversion processes using only seismic or EM data. This technique can be helpful for accurate decision-making in gas hydrate development as well as in their production monitoring.