Incorporation of shear waves to study fractured reservoirs in Abu Dhabi oil fields

Abstract

A robust and cost-effective method for obtaining fracture orientation at reservoir zones in Abu Dhabi oilfields will be investigated in this work. According to several authors, fracture strike determination with methods for seismic data analysis, is best described when the shear-wave splitting phenomenon is observed and studied in detail; yet the detection of shear-wave splitting is not simple. Further, at the exploration level the shear-wave splitting concept is seldom used because of the survey acquisition challenges at this scale. To tackle this problem, a software for obtaining fracture orientation from the available 3C VSP (three component vertical seismic profile) datasets in Abu Dhabi oilfields was developed in this thesis. This work is a contribution to the, virtually cost-free, data extraction and interpretation of shear waves obtained during the exploration at offshore and onshore oil producing wells in Abu Dhabi.

Date of Award	Jul 2022
Original language	American English