Quasi‐continuous reservoir monitoring with surface seismic data

We present an approach that creates the possibility of reservoir monitoring on a quasi‐continuous basis using surface seismic data. Current strategies and logistics for seismic data acquisition impose restrictions on the calendar‐time temporal resolution obtainable for a given surface‐seismic time‐lapse monitoring program. One factor that restricts the implementation of a quasi‐continuous monitoring program using conventional strategies is the time it takes to acquire a complete survey. Here quasi‐continuous monitoring describes the process of reservoir monitoring at short‐time intervals. Our approach circumvents the restriction by requiring only a subset of complete survey data each time an image of the reservoir is needed using surface seismic data. Ideally, the time interval between survey subset acquisitions should be short so that changes in the reservoir properties are small. The accumulated data acquired are used to estimate the unavailable data at the monitor survey time and the combined recorded and estimated data are used to produce an image of the subsurface for monitoring. We will illustrate the effectiveness of our approach using 2D and 3D synthetic seismic data and 3D field seismic data. We will explain the benefits and drawbacks of the proposed approach.