Target-Oriented Inversion of Time-Lapse Seismic Waveform Data

Abstract

Full waveform inversion of time-lapse seismic data can be used as a means of estimating the reservoir changes due to the production. Since the repeated computations for the monitor surveys lead to a large computational cost, time-lapse full waveform inversion is still considered to be a challenging task. To address this problem, we present an efficient target-oriented inversion scheme for time-lapse seismic data using an integral equation formulation with Gaussian beam based Green's function approach. The proposed time-lapse approach allows one to perform a local inversion within a small region of interest (e.g. a reservoir under production) for the monitor survey. We have verified that the T-matrix approach is indeed naturally target-oriented, which was mentioned by Jakobsen and Ursin [24] and allows one to reduce the computational cost of time-lapse inversion by focusing the inversion on the target-area only. This method is based on a new version of the distorted Born iterative T-matrix inverse scattering method. The Gaussian beam and T-matrix are used in this approach to perform the wavefield computation for the time-lapse inversion in the baseline model from the survey surface to the target region. We have provided target-oriented inversion results of the synthetic time-lapse waveform data, which shows that the proposed scheme reduces the computational cost significantly.