Full-Volume Seismic Interpretation – Strategic Innovation in Seismic Geology

Summary Continuous development of acquisition and processing techniques of seismic data provides nowadays, subsurface images of very high quality and resolution even in complex geological environments. It enables to perform the very fine geological models. But seismic interpretation is still an intensive and time-consuming process based on manual picking or auto-tracking of single horizons. As a result, seismic data is not employed in its entirety. That is why so many efforts in recent years are focused to advance new seismic interpretation techniques, which aim not only to automate interpretation, to make it faster and more accurate, but to correlate seismic positions along geologic time lines to provide a continuous fully interpreted seismic volumes. Convenience of such approaches is not so much by the continuity of interpreted seismic volumes. However, continuity itself enables to estimate relative geologic age between of any two points of seismic volume and to obtain any number of equivalent time lines or surfaces. The point at issue is that we can get more geological information from seismic data and make our models more sophisticated to reduce uncertainties and exploration risks. In this work, we use new technology (SAI) to demonstrate advantages of full-volume seismic interpretation for exploration.