Microseismic expertise

Overview

GaffneyCline™ energy advisory brings a wealth of microseismic design, deployment, and analysis expertise to help you minimize subsurface risks while maximizing reservoir recovery.  

Assess and design the best network for your monitoring goals 

We design seismic monitoring systems per your field needs. Our three-step design process includes:  

• Matching system designs to your business requirements, which begins with in-depth examinations of your motivations and transcribes them into microseismic objectives
• Geophysical modeling using Baker Hughes modeling software to simulate wave propagation, analyze various field layouts, and help design the optimal geometrical sensor network to meet business objectives
• Front-end engineering design that considers local deployment constraints to arrive at the appropriate software and hardware architecture for optimal microseismic monitoring, subsurface-to-surface communication, and data flow

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Improve decision-making with traffic-light system support 

We support safe field operations by using real-time microseismic data to design, deploy, and operate traffic light systems (TLS). If your operations exceed threshold tolerances, the traffic-light warning protocol will issue audible and visual warnings, which may prompt a halt to operations. 

We then work carefully and quickly to resolve the issue by deploying automatic processing systems in parallel with a qualified analyst who: 

• Quality controls the automatic processing results
• Reports TLS status changes and assesses the associated root causes 

Leverage advanced data processing  

We use innovative processing techniques that account for the complexity of your reservoir, including advanced: 

• Detection for low signal-to-noise ratio microseismic events
• Background noise analysis
• Processing techniques for microseismic event characterization, including picking multiple wave arrivals, double-difference, moment tensor inversion (MTI), and discrete fracture network (DFN) modeling 

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Calibrate velocity models  

We assess and update your existing velocity models to improve location accuracy. Our calibration expertise incorporates:  

• A wide variety of models:
  • From simple layered to 3D with complex interfaces
  • Isotropic or anisotropic models (VTI, TTI)
  • Q factor fixed or inferred during the inversion process
• Arbitrary network geometries, including borehole, surface, or hybrid
• Calibration strategies tailored to available inputs and designed to reduce:
  • Relocation errors from known sources, such as perforation shots and independently relocated strong events
  • Post-location time/polarization residuals and misfits based on an arbitrary number of wave arrivals
• Possible joint inversion of velocity model and event locations
• Concurrent calibration processes to identify similarly performing model families and assess uncertainty on model parameters 

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Improve asset understanding with multidisciplinary expertise 

Our multidisciplinary team of geomechanics specialists, geologists, and geophysical experts study multi-faceted data sets to help you better understand your asset’s behavior. Our expert services include: 

• Interpretation of site seismicity provided from seismometers or other data types, including site production, geology, tectonics, petrophysics, geomechanics, statistical analysis, weather, subsidence, and hydrologic data
• Mining of seismological data via catalogs and probabilistic geo-processing
• Analysis of seismic data by incorporating contextual elements like existing faults and production data  

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Contact your Baker Hughes representative to learn how GaffneyCline energy advisory can help you design and optimize the ideal microseismic monitoring network for your field development goals.