NSF Award
9901828
This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will commercialize innovative and significant recent advances in the applications of partial differential equations, viscosity theory of Hamilton-Jacobi equations, and hyperbolic conservation laws to problems of imaging seismic data volumes used in oil and gas exploration. In order to perform contemporary reservoir development and exploration, fast and accurate three-dimensional prestack depth migration is required, which itself requires successful parameterization of wave propagation phenomena with asymptotic Green's functions commonly generated by raytracing or finite difference traveltimes. During Phase I, the firm analyzed the performance and capabilities of fast Marching Methods (FMM) for calculating the required asymptotic Green's functions. FMM techniques compute the correct viscosity solution to the first arrival equation and are the fastest travel time computation schemes available. They rely on a marriage of upwind finite difference operators for entropy-satisfying gradients, consistent entropy-satisfying approximations, and fast heap sort algorithms. The methods are, unconditionally stable, require no time step, and are particularly well-suited for the large variations in velocities typical and inherent in oil/gas exploration. Phase I results indicate that FMM techniques indeed offer significant advantages over previous techniques, and can be extended to calculate energetic and multivalued traveltimes.<br/> When coupled with migration software, the speed, robustness and accuracy of FMM allows significant increase in efficiency and accuracy of seismic imaging. This has a direct and significant impact on the oil/gas industry by providing a fast, accurate and easy to use imaging method for the complex geological structures that are being explored and exploited in today's competitive exploration and production environment.
