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At South Arne a highly repeatable time-lapse seismic survey (normalized root-mean-square error or NRMS of less than 0.1) allowed us to reliably monitor reservoir production processes during five years of reservoir depletion. Time-lapse AVO (amplitude v. offset) inversion and rock-physics analysis enables accurate monitoring of fluid pathways. On the crest of the field, water injection results in a heterogeneous sweep of the reservoir, whereby the majority of the injected water intrudes into a highly porous body. This is in contrast to a pre-existing reservoir simulation model predicting a homogeneous sweep. On the SW flank, time-lapse AVO inversion to changes in water saturation Δ S w reveals that the drainage pattern is fault controlled. Time-lapse seismic data furthermore explain the lack of production from the far end of a horizontal producer (as observed by production logging), by showing that the injected water does not result in the expected pressure support. On the highly porous crest of the reservoir compaction occurs. Time-lapse time shifts in the overburden are used as a measure for compaction and are compared with predictions of reservoir compaction from reservoir geomechanical modelling. In areas where compaction observations and predictions disagree, time-lapse seismic data give the necessary insight to validate, calibrate and update the reservoir geomechanical model. The information contained in time-lapse seismic data can only be fully extracted and used when the reservoir simulation model, the reservoir geomechanical model and the time-lapse seismic inversion models are co-visualized and available in the same software application with one set of coordinates. This allows for easy and reliable investigation of reservoir depletion and gives deeper insight than using reservoir simulation or time-lapse seismic individually.

We employ numerical stress simulation techniques to evaluate the most likely present-day geomechanical scenario. This is performed on seismic-driven elastically-heterogeneous models, which are then used to predict potential wellbore stability hazards on large spatial scales. We present an example of this approach in a field of the Gulf of Mexico. A post-processing stage is used to generate a series of geomechanical attributes that provide insights on the optimum operational parameters for well placement and drilling stability.

Time-lapse seismic timeshifts are now widely used to study reservoir compaction. This is possible since (overburden) time-lapse timeshifts can be attributed to compaction-induced overburden stretching, increasing the length of the seismic ray-path, and associated velocity slowdown. Both path-length increase and velocity slowdown cause an increase in traveltime in a seismic monitor survey compared to a base-line survey.

Oil/gas exploration is an expensive, high-risk operation. The understanding of the stress regime and geological structures in a field plays a critical role in selecting exploration wells to determine the presence or absence of oil/gas in field exploration.