A study aid for seismic data interpretation and analysis

We present the workflow for 3-D seismic data interpretation and analysis that is routinely performed throughout the exploration phase in the industry. The workflow is used as a study aid for the first-year graduate students in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering at Pukyong National University, Busan, Korea. The data used in this work consist of 3-D seismic and well-log data from the Sooner field, Colorado, USA and 2-D and 3-D seismic data from the Penobscot surveys carried out in the Scotian shelf, Canada. The Sooner field data are part of the tutorial data sets of Kingdom Suite° which was used for data interpretation and mapping. The Penobscot data are available from the OpendTect°'s website. OpendTect° was used for seismic attribute generation and Hampson-Russell° was used for amplitude variation with offset (AVO) analysis and inversion. The workflow includes: (1) structural interpretation and mapping and 3-D visualization; (2) time-depth conversion; (3) (sequence) stratigraphic analysis; (4) attribute analysis and 3-D visualization; (5) quantitative analysis (e.g., AVO, inversion); and (6) volumetric calculations.