Highly repeatable 3D compressive full-azimuth towed-streamer time-lapse acquisition –- a numerical feasibility study at scale

Most conventional 3D time-lapse (or 4D) acquisitions are ocean-bottom cable (OBC) or ocean-bottom node (OBN) surveys since these surveys are relatively easy to replicate compared to towed-streamer surveys. To attain high degrees of repeatability, survey replicability and dense periodic sampling has become the norm for 4D surveys that renders this technology expensive. Conventional towed-streamer acquisitions suffer from limited illumination of subsurface due to narrow azimuth. Although, acquisition techniques such as multi-azimuth, wide-azimuth, rich-azimuth acquisition, etc., have been developed to illuminate the subsurface from all possible angles, these techniques can be prohibitively expensive for densely sampled surveys. This leads to uneven sampling, i.e., dense receiver and coarse source sampling or vice-versa, in order to make these acquisitions more affordable. Motivated by the design principles of Compressive Sensing (CS), we acquire economic, randomly subsampled (or compressive) and simultaneous towed-streamer time-lapse data without the need of replicating the surveys. We recover densely sampled time-lapse data on one and the same periodic grid by using a joint-recovery model (JRM) that exploits shared information among different time-lapse recordings, coupled with a computationally cheap and scalable rank-minimization technique. The acquisition is low cost since we have subsampled measurements (about 70% subsampled), simulated with a simultaneous long-offset acquisition configuration of two source vessels travelling across a survey area at random azimuths. We analyze the performance of our proposed compressive acquisition and subsequent recovery strategy by conducting a synthetic, at scale, seismic experiment on a 3D time-lapse model containing geological features such as channel systems, dipping and faulted beds, unconformities and a gas cloud. Our findings indicate that the insistence on replicability between surveys and the need for OBC/OBN 4D surveys can, perhaps, be relaxed. Moreover, this is a natural next step beyond the successful CS acquisition examples discussed during this session.

https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Conferences/SINBAD/2017/Fall...