Imaging deep reservoirs in a complicated shallow overburden setting can be challenging. That’s what some operators in the Delaware Basin concluded in areas where the reservoirs lie beneath the Cenozoic sedimentary fill zone. The reasons are numerous. Wavefield scattering between the different formations creates artefacts in the seismic data, and salt dissolution and subsequent collapse of the overlying rocks caused a significant vertical offset in the sedimentary strata.
It is that combination of factors that resulted in the seismic resolution in a large part of the Delaware Basin being insufficient to properly map the deeper unconventional reservoirs of the Bone Spring and Wolfcamp formations. This caused companies to give up on the idea of using seismic data to play a role in development plans.
It is against that backdrop that Fairfield Geotechnologies, supported by four operating companies in the Delaware Basin, ran a high-trace-density seismic acquisition campaign to prove that, with the right trace-density setup, imaging the shallow structural complexity of the Rustler formation, as seen in the foldout, improves the resolution of the reservoir beneath.
Read more about how this was achieved in the article.