Economic time-lapse seismic acquisition and imaging–-Reaping the benefits of randomized sampling with distributed compressive sensing

This thesis presents a novel viewpoint on the implicit opportunities randomized surveys bring to time-lapse seismic - which is a proven surveillance tool for hydrocarbon reservoir monitoring. Time-lapse (4D) seismic combines acquisition and processing of at least two seismic datasets (or vintages) in order to extract information related to changes in a reservoir within a specified time interval. The current paradigm places stringent requirements on replicating the 4D surveys, which is an expensive task often requiring uneconomical dense sampling of seismic wavefields. To mitigate the challenges of dense sampling, several advances in seismic acquisition have been made in recent years including the use of multiple sources firing at near simultaneous random times, and the adaptation of Compressive Sensing (CS) principles to design practical acquisition engines that improve sampling efficiency for seismic data acquisition. However, little is known regarding the implications of these developments for time-lapse studies. By conducting multiple experiments modelling surveys adhering to the principles of CS for 4D seismic, I propose a model that demonstrates the feasibility of randomized acquisitions for time-lapse seismic. The proposed joint recovery model (JRM), which derives from distributed CS, exploits the common information in time-lapse data during recovery of dense wavefields from measured subsampled data, providing highly repeatable and high-fidelity vintages. I show that we obtain better vintages when randomized surveys are not replicated, in contrast to standard practice, paving the way for an opportunity to relax the rigorous requirement to replicate surveys precisely. We assert that the vintages obtained using our proposed model are of sufficient quality to serve as inputs to processes that extract time-lapse attributes from which subsurface changes are deduced. Additionally, I show that recovery with the JRM is robust with respect to errors due to differences between actual and recorded postplot information. Finally, I present an opportunity to adapt our model to problems related to time-lapse seismic imaging where the main finding is that we can better delineate time-lapse changes by adapting the joint recovery model to wave-equation based inversion methods.