Seismic attribute-assisted seismic fault interpretation

Abstract

Fault mapping is one of the main tasks of 3D seismic interpretation, and seismic discontinuity attributes are often used to support fault mapping in vertical sections and time slices. The most commonly used fault mapping procedure involves three passes/generations. First, the approximate positions of faults (generation I) on some vertical sections are interpreted manually. Second, the generation I faults are projected on some time slices, and the individual fault traces (generation II) are picked on time slices. Finally, the generation II faults are projected onto the vertical sections and the fault sticks (generation III) are picked in the vertical sections. To speed up the fault mapping process, we use the seismic discontinuity attribute as input to automatically extract the generation III faults in the vertical sections under the generation I and II fault mapping conditions. A quality control (QC) step is essential to improve the accuracy of the automatically generated fault sticks. To reduce the time required for QC, we propose to output the fault sticks on the seismic vertical sections defined by the interpreters. The workflow is applied to a real seismic survey to demonstrate its effectiveness.