Spectral Decomposition Using S-transform for Hydrocarbon Detection and Filtering

Spectral decomposition is a modern tool that utilizes seismic data to generate additional useful information in seismic exploration for hydrocarbon detection, lithology identification, stratigraphic interpretation, filtering and others. Different spectral decomposition methods with applications to seismic data were reported and investigated in past years. Many methods usually do not consider the non-stationary features of seismic data and, therefore, are not likely to give satisfactory results. S-transform developed in recent years is able to provide time-dependent frequency analysis while maintaining a direct relationship with the Fourier spectrum, a unique property that other methods of spectral decomposition may not have. In this thesis, I investigated the feasibility and efficiency of using S-transform for hydrocarbon detection and time-varying surface wave filtering.

S-transform was first applied to two seismic data sets from a clastic reservoir in the North Sea and a deep carbonate reservoir in the Sichuan Basin, China. Results from both cases demonstrated that S-transform decomposition technique can detect hydrocarbon zones effectively and helps to build the relationships between lithology changes and high frequency variation and between hydrocarbon occurrence and low-frequency anomaly. However, its time resolution needs to be improved.

In the second part of my thesis, I used S-transform to develop a novel Time-frequency-wave-number-domain (T-F-K) filtering method to separate surface wave from reflected waves in seismic records. The S-T-F-K filtering proposed here can be used to analyze surface waves on separate f-k panels at different times. The method was tested using hydrophone records of four-component seismic data acquired in the shallow-water Persian Gulf where the average water depth is about 10m and Scholte waves and other surfaces wave persistently strong. Results showed that this new S-T-F-K method is able to separate and sttenuate surface waves and to improve greatly the quality of seismic reflection signals that are otherwise completely concealed by the aliased surface waves.