Objective
Objectives and problems to be solved:
SIMBA gathers European expertise in a broad range of geophysical disciplines for a radically new, more fundamental approach to the problem of subsurface description. Our objective is to change industry practice for problems of hydrocarbon reservoir characterization, subsurface pollution and natural risk prevention. To achieve this, experts from the industry, service companies and academia together will focus on the problem of Earth heterogeneities, enhancing existing state-of-the art techniques and developing new techniques to increase the resolution and accuracy of geophysical data and their interpretation. The key to our success will be the ability to integrate geology, seismic modelling and processing, and potential and electromagnetic methods into a new global methodology - this will be our main challenge.
Description of work:
Instead of using computer- and labour-intensive methods on imperfect seismic data as is currently done, our approach is to take a fundamental look at the problem of subsurface heterogeneities and develop new software for taking them into account.
We will better understand
1. Their geological basis,
2. Their expression on seismic and non-seismic data,
3. Ways that can be used to assess and exploit all the information from all the data.
We expect to demonstrate significant benefits from our approach, which emphasizes integration between geology, seismic and non-seismic geophysics. The work plan is organized in two phases comprising six work packages. This reflects a progression from background work in the four main disciplines in the first phase, to reach a data acquisition, integration and demonstration stage on a major case study in the second phase. The first phase comprises four Work Packages corresponding to the four different areas of scientific investigation: geology, seismic modelling, gravity/magnetics/electromagnetics and seismic processing. Initially based on independent theoretical advances in a wide range of disciplines, this phase will gradually allow the partners to merge their techniques and unify their effort to obtain a clear problem-solving methodology. The geological knowledge derived on heterogeneous media will produce new reference models, which will be used to study the effects on the seismic response and to research and develop new tools for properly handling this response. We will also use these models to evaluate the benefit of non-seismic data and how it can be integrated with the seismic information. The end of this first phase will be an essential milestone: we will define a global methodology based on the results obtained, to best integrate all data types and optimise processing. In the second phase, we will demonstrate the methodology by applying it to a case study of interest to the industry. We will select the demonstration area for the case study (early in the project). We will acquire new magneto-telluric data over the study area as needed, generate 3D seismic datasets and study the optimal acquisition geometries and their impact on data quality. Processing and integration of all data will then be performed to derive an improved description of the subsurface in the demonstration area. Expected results and exploitation plans: In the end, we will have validated the new tools and obtained the necessary data for implementing the global methodology on a large-scale case study of interest to the oil & gas industry. Cost reduction and changes in reserves will be measured on the demonstration case. Our results will be largely disseminated.
Fields of science
- natural scienceschemical sciencesorganic chemistryhydrocarbons
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesenvironmental sciencespollution
- natural sciencesmathematicspure mathematicsgeometry
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesgeophysics
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesgeology
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
SW1E 6NN LONDON
United Kingdom