Comparison of vertical seismic profiling techniques

Abstract

To study the imaging characteristics of various vertical seismic profiling techniques, two vertical seismic profiles (VSP) and a reversed vertical seismic profile (RVSP), where source and receiver positions are interchanged, were collected in the Loudon Oil Field in Illinois. Both VSPs were collected using a line of dynamite charges on the surface as sources. One was collected with geophones and the other with hydrophones as downhole receivers. The RVSP was collected by detonating 25 gram explosive charges in a well and detecting the seismic response with geophones at the surface. Three subsurface images (VSP with geophones, VSP with hydrophones, and RVSP) were produced using VSP-CDP transforms. For comparison, a surface seismic profile was collected along the same line with dynamite sources and vertical geophone receivers. The RVSP and hydrophone VSP stacked sections both produced higher frequency images at shallower depths than did the geophone VSP stacked section. However, the lower frequency geophone VSP stacked section produced an interpretable subsurface image at much greater depths than either the RVSP or the hydrophone VSP sections. The differences are due in part to the more powerful surface sources that were used for the VSPs than the downhole sources used for the RVSP. Furthermore, tube‐wave noise was a more severe problem for both the RVSP and the hydrophone VSP than for the geophone VSP. The results of this experiment demonstrate that if tube‐wave noise could be suppressed, hydrophone VSPs would provide attractive alternatives to geophone VSPs, because it is much easier and cheaper to deploy multilevel hydrophones downhole than geophones. Also, if a high‐powered, nondestructive source is developed, RVSP could be a practical alternative to VSP since one can easily lay out numerous receivers on the surface to record multioffset or three‐dimensional (3-D) VSP data.