Geophysical Prospecting Lab, Energy and Resources Engineering Dept., Chonnam National University, Gwangju, South Korea.
J Adv Res. 2016 May;7(3):515-24. doi: 10.1016/j.jare.2015.11.004. Epub 2015 Nov 30.
Searching for hydrocarbon reserves in deep subsurface is the main concern of wide community of geophysicists and geoscientists in petroleum industry. Exploration seismology has substantially contributed to finding and developing giant fields worldwide. The technology has evolved from two to three-dimensional method, and later added a fourth dimension for reservoir monitoring. Continuous depletion of many old fields and the increasing world consumption of crude oil pushed to consistently search for techniques that help recover more reserves from old fields and find alternative fields in more complex and deeper formations either on land and in offshore. In such environments, conventional seismic with the compressional (P) wave alone proved to be insufficient. Multicomponent seismology came as a solution to most limitations encountered in P-wave imaging. That is, recording different components of the seismic wave field allowed geophysicists to map complex reservoirs and extract information that could not be extracted previously. The technology demonstrated its value in many fields and gained popularity in basins worldwide. In this review study, we give an overview about multicomponent seismology, its history, data acquisition, processing and interpretation as well as the state-of the-art of its applications. Recent examples from world basins are highlighted. The study concludes that despite the success achieved in many geographical areas such as deep offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, Western Canada Sedimentary Basin (WCSB), North Sea, Offshore Brazil, China and Australia, much work remains for the technology to gain similar acceptance in other areas such as Middle East, East Asia, West Africa and North Africa. However, with the tremendous advances reported in data recording, processing and interpretation, the situation may change.
在深地下寻找碳氢化合物储量是广大地球物理学家和地质学家关注的主要问题。石油工业中的地震勘探技术在全球范围内发现和开发巨型油田方面做出了重大贡献。该技术已从二维和三维方法发展而来，后来又增加了第四个维度用于储层监测。许多旧油田的持续枯竭和世界对原油需求的不断增长，促使人们不断寻找有助于从旧油田中回收更多储量的技术，并在陆地和近海更复杂和更深的地层中寻找替代油田。在这种环境下，仅使用压缩波（P 波）的常规地震技术被证明是不够的。多分量地震学作为解决 P 波成像中遇到的大多数限制的一种方法应运而生。也就是说，记录地震波场的不同分量使地球物理学家能够绘制复杂的储层并提取以前无法提取的信息。该技术在许多领域都证明了其价值，并在全球范围内得到了广泛应用。在本综述研究中，我们概述了多分量地震学的历史、数据采集、处理和解释以及其应用的最新进展。强调了来自世界盆地的最新实例。该研究得出结论，尽管在许多地理区域取得了成功，例如墨西哥湾深海、加拿大西部沉积盆地 (WCSB)、北海、巴西近海、中国和澳大利亚，但该技术在中东、东亚、西非和北非等其他地区获得类似认可仍有大量工作要做。然而，随着数据记录、处理和解释方面取得的巨大进展，情况可能会发生变化。
