Accessing Horizon Picking Uncertainty using Complex Seismic Trace Attributes

Abstract

Many uncertainty sources are linked to the reservoir modeling processes, significantly affecting all phases of the exploration, development, and production phases of an oil & gas field. Structural uncertainty due to velocity models are commonly considered by taking a range of equiprobable domain conversion velocity models and evaluating the related impact on GRV distributions. In contrast, the seismic interpretation inaccuracy is commonly neglected because of the difficulty in quantifying it. This means that seismic mapping is frequently treated as having no variation or having the intrinsic imprecisions arbitrarily assigned. In this work, we propose an objective approach to evaluate the horizon picking uncertainties, which was based on the extraction of complex seismic trace attributes considering a previously mapped reference reflector. In real seismic data, phase distortions may arise from a vast bunch of reasons, such as dispersion, attenuation, bandwidth limitations. Thus, the instantaneous phase attribute can be an indicator of uncertainties associated with seismic reflector interpretation.