Paradigm™ Customer Newsletter, Vol.2 Ed.6 December 2009

Please take the Certain Vision Feedback Survey -- Click here to begin

Paradigm Introduces Brand New Academic Software Program Academic institutions play a crucial role in researching and refining our software products. They are also essential to our business because their educators introduce students to the solutions needed to address challenges in the energy industry. We hope to familiarize students with our innovative products so that they can continue as productive users upon entering the workforce. For years we have offered academic institutions limited access to our software. The associated pricing arrangements unfortunately were relatively unstructured and at times confusing. However, we have remedied those shortcomings, and I am very excited to announce that the much anticipated Paradigm Academic Software Programme is now available. We now offer nearly all our commercial products for academic use. Product combinations are packaged into 5 academic bundles for ease of access. Each bundle can be leased annually for a minimal administration fee, with the option to obtain add-on products if desired. Additionally, Paradigm has set up a university grants system to benefit classroom use or qualified research project. If you have any questions or know of colleagues who may be interested in the Paradigm Academic Software Programme, please feel free to contact me. I will be happy to help. Kind Regards, Katherine Harington Global University Coordinator

Upcoming Events » Paradigm Interpretation & Modeling User Group Meeting The postponed Interpretation and Modelling User Group Meeting will now take place on 16 & 17 February 2010 at the famous Twickenham Stadium, home of England Rugby, situated in West London. It has recently opened its amazing new South Stand integrating its conference facilities with the 4* Marriott Hotel. This is the first Interpretation & Modelling User Group Meeting to be held in the EA region and we hope to offer our customers an opportunity to learn more about our products and support. The technical agenda includes: ¤ Paradigm Roadmap ¤ Rock & Fluid Canvas™ 2009 | Epos® 4.0 Release Overview ¤ Introduction to Paradigm™ StratEarth™ – Geological Interpretation ¤ Integration Demonstration ¤ Rock & Fluid Canvas™ 2009 | Epos® 4.0 Presentations Q&A Session ¤ Case Study 1 - Complex Structural Interpretation & Modeling ¤ Case Study 2 - Lead Identification, West Africa ¤ Customer Presentations ¤ Introduction to the New Support Infrastructure, including RightNow ¤ Useful Techniques for Interpretation & Modeling ¤ User Discussion Forum with Support - Steer the Development of Your Products If you would like to register for the User Group Meeting please contact your account manager or Sam Hammond by email at Samantha.hammond@pdgm.com. Recent Events » Paradigm Processing & Imaging user Group Meeting This annual event was held in the beautiful Oslo Military Society Assembly Rooms at the beginning of October. All those that came along were able to experience firsthand the practical implementation of the new workflows available in Paradigm™ Echos™ & GeoDepth® in the Rock & Fluid Canvas™ 2009 | Epos® 4.0 release, as well as ask questions to the product development teams. On the first evening evening, several people attended a very damp tour of the Akerhaus Castle and afterwards had a lovely meal at Maud’s restaurant. Plans are already in motion for next year’s Processing & Imaging User Group Meeting and if you have any comments or feedback please contact Sam Hammond.

Paradigm Echos 1.0 - New Features and Enhancements The Echos™ 1.0 version of the Paradigm™ Rock & Fluid Canvas™ 2009 | Epos® 4.0 release replaces the former processing system known as Focus. The Echos 1.0 release is a major step forward in the integration efforts with the Epos infrastructure with application code changes to take advantage of today’s modern computers along with new geophysical applications. Echos 1.0 is based on the Paradigm™ Epos® 4.0 data management and interoperability integration framework, and shares many Epos Management Utilities to add and/or remove users and user groups, to manage permissions, to register projects/surveys and tools to backup and restore surveys. Echos 1.0 also resolves memory problems and memory accessibility problems related to 32-bit memory addressing by adapting Fortran 90 standards and supporting 64 bit memory allocation. Fig. 1: 3D SRME, Input on the left, the 3D SRME result in the center and the Multiples eliminated on the right For Echos 1.0, the Epos 4.0 vertical function repository is implemented and the existing Focus velocity database VELDEFN format is replaced with the new vertical function repository that is common to other Paradigm products. A new interpolation library is introduced, that is much more robust and efficient (run times down from weeks to hours), allows two-key interpolation, handles coordinates with double precision, and has better definition of points that fall outside the model. The Echos online help has been updated to the new Paradigm standard for product documentation. The new help is html based and launched in your browser. The documents may also be viewed as PDF format to facilitate printing of the individual help items. Fig. 2: WEMA – migrated image of the input data at the left with migrated image of the WEMA data after both source and receiver attenuation on the right. Notice the missing multiple energy. The major new geophysical applications are 3D Surface Related Multiple Elimination (3D SRME), a Wave Equation Multiple Attenuation method, Apex Shifted Radon Filtering and a new HiRes Parabolic Radon Filtering method (time domain sparse inversion). 3D SRME is a true multi-threaded application for linux clusters. The application is tolerant of imperfect acquisition geometry and can cope with missing source lines, streamers, shots or receivers. An example of the multiples eliminated is shown in Figure 1. Wave Equation Multiple Attenuation (WEMA) is based on wave field continuation using water depth information and operates in the common shot and/or common receiver domains. This method can cope with irregular or combined gathers and supports both 2D and 3D gathers. An example of WEMA is shown in Figure 2. Fig. 3: a) Synthetic example, b) Real example showing the result of Apex Shifted Radon Transform Filtering. The different sections between the input and output clearly represent the filtered energy in both examples. RADNAPX - Apex shifted Radon Transform Filtering- NMO corrected CDP gathers can be transformed by Radon transform into a 3D space with dimensions of travel time, curvature and apex-shift distance. The non-hyperbolic energy, including the diffracted multiples may be filtered effectively in this domain. Figure 3 presents synthetic and real data examples for Apex Shifted Radon Filtering. Edip Baysal Chief Geophysicist

Epos 4.0 Introduces Volume Curvature and New 3D Propagator Attributes Paradigm has a large portfolio of physical and geometric seismic data attributes that allow our customers to uncover features or properties of seismic data that are not directly visible from seismic amplitude data. Epos 4.0 introduces two attributes, Volume Curvature and new 3D Propagator attributes, that extend this portfolio of interpretation assets. Surface curvature of various kinds has have been available in Epos- based applications for some time. Surface curvature is a derivative value for any surface but has been commonly used with horizon surfaces as an indicator of spikes and thus a means of threshold editing. Using our sign conventions for curvature, anticlines will yield positive measures of curvature while synclines will yield negative values while saddle like features will yield both positive and negative curvature measures. Curvature can be measured at any point on a surface and at in any direction. Choices if for the direction such as dip, strike, direction of maximum curvature, direction of most positive curvature and choices for averaging or summing curvature in two orthogonal directions yield a large number of different curvature measures. From our current experience we have found that the most positive curvature and the most negative curvature are two of the most useful values. Anticlines and ridges will yield high values for “most positive” curvature. Synclines and troughs will yield high values for most negative curvature. These two measures will help highlight faults, tight folds not yet faulted and channel-levee systems; all of these features are characterized by high surface curvature in one direction and minimal or zero curvature in the orthogonal direction. Most positive and most negative curvature measures will tend to measure curvature adaptively in the direction orthogonal to each of these features. With more experience we may find uses for other curvature measures. For example Gaussian curvature, which is the product of maximum and minimum curvature at a point, may be an indicator of surface changes other than folding. Figure 1: Coherency on the left and most positive curvature at right. Fault relaying is more apparent in the volume curvature example Volume curvature is a volume measure at each point of a volume. The measure is made by fitting a small surface around each sample in the volume and as such it does not require that an interpreted surface is calculated first. Volume curvature may be displayed for a whole volume or sub-volume in a variable opacity voxel style display or for any surface through a volume such as a vertical section, time slice or an interpreted horizon. Because volume curvature will indicate high values at faults or tight folds and reef or channel-levee systems then it too can be used as a fault or fold indicator or an indicator of stratigraphic feature boundaries. In this purpose it should be seen as a complementary product to Coherency Cube. Actual breaks in reflectors are well indicated by coherency measures. Bends in reflectors that are not broken at seismic scale may be indicated by curvature. From above, a normal fault will look like a parallel set of tracks of positive and negative curvature from volumes of that type. A channel –levee system may look like three parallel tracks of positive, negative and positive curvature in its original configuration or possibly tracks of negative, positive and negative curvature if the shaly levees are differentially compacted more than a sand filled channel so that the original configuration is inverted. Coherency and Volume curvature results are displayed in Figure 1. Figure 2: The number of descendants attribute for a single seed on a channel Interpreters have long known that the direction of propagation in the 3D horizon propagator carries useful information. This used to be witnessed when the propagation results were posted on a base map and computers were much slower than today. We have introduced two attributes that capture and save this information so that it may be displayed and examined. Our propagation starts at a seed point and then propagates in the direction of best correlation as measured from trace shape by our algorithm. This makes our 3D Propagator follow geology rather than expanding from seed points in all directions in the manner of earlier surface picking algorithms. For each point propagated we keep track of the number of algorithmic descendants from this point and the number of picking generations required to reach this point. The number of descendants gives us a measure of the importance of each point in the propagation of the surface. A river provides a simple analogy if you measure the volume of water flowing through a point. As the water swirls around there may be little direct connection of flow between adjacent points so the path of a sample droplet may be uninteresting. If the volume of all such droplets is summed for a point then that will give a good indication of the importance of each point in a watershed. The 3D propagator reverses this flow and starts at the delta, seed point, and flows to fill up the watershed, the propagated surface. The number of ancestor generations gives us an idea of the sequence of propagation. Two adjacent points with differing numbers of ancestors can be indicate totally different ancestry and then indirectly indicate faults, feature boundaries or changes in trace shape caused by lithology or fluids. The power of statistics from large numbers of observations is indicated in Figure 2. A seed was chosen at the deepest part of a channel in a section view at the point indicated by the white arrow, The number of descendants attribute shows the subsequent propagation has picked the thalweg of the channel in a linear fashion while picking the apparent over bank deposits above and to the right and left of the seed in tree like fashion. These attributes may indicate subtle depositional grain in laminar deposits. The data used for both examples is by courtesy of Clyde Petroleum. Huw James Chief Designer, Interpretation Solutions

Comments on the newsletter   I  Contact us