Modeling of hydrocarbon trap types developing in complex geological environments by exploding reflector method

Abstract

Structural and stratigraphic hydrocarbon (oil, gas) traps that develop in complex geological environments are formed in regions subjected to tectonically deformation or where there are impermeable rocks in the lateral direction and accumulate significant amounts of hydrocarbons. Reflections from the subsurface media including such traps indicate highly complex behaviour. Therefore, understanding seismic wave propagation in such environments provide important contributions to the interpretation stage. In this study, the modeling of structural and stratigraphic hydrocarbon traps was carried out with exploding reflector (ER) technique. The most important advantages of the method is that the seismic source is located at the reflective interfaces and recorded by the receivers at the surface with the one way travel time. Therefore, as a result of the calculation, directly zero offset sections could be obtained. Numerical calculation of the seismic waves propagated from the source was made by the finite difference method (FDM) which is very useful due to the ability to choose arbitrary input models with different features and provide direct solutions to wave propagation problems. Thus, seismic models of channel, anticline, syncline, normal fault type traps which are frequently encountered in hydrocarbon explorations were calculated easily and quickly by means of the solution of the full wave field with FDM based on the exploding reflector technique. As a result, it has been shown that obtaining zero offset sections (stacked sections) with the ER technique will practically make important contributions to the interpreter during the interpretation of real seismic data.