Seismic and sonic wave attenuation of carbonate rocks in an onshore abu dhabi oil field

Obtaining reliable attenuation values in highly heterogeneous carbonate rocks developed in Abu Dhabi oil fields is important to characterize their reservoir properties. In this study, we estimated seismic wave attenuation from first arrival waveforms of zero-offset Vertical Seismic Profiling (VSP) data by using recently developed method based on combination of seismic interferometry (SI) and modified median frequency shift (MMFS) methods. The results show that the total P-wave attenuation (1/Q) varies between 0.01 and 0.25, with significant contribution of scattering, which is due to highly heterogeneous media. Furthermore, we estimated the P- and S-wave attenuation from monopole and two kinds of dipole sonic waveforms by using the MMFS method. The monopole attenuation ranges from 0.032 and 0.052, dipole inline attenuation from 0.048 to 0.092 and dipole offline attenuation from 0.06 to 0.106. Our sonic attenuation results are compared and correlated with other petrophysical parameters, allowing us to discuss possible attenuation mechanisms for obtained attenuation results. We also demonstrated that the S-wave attenuation anisotropy is sensitive indicator of the high density of fractures.