Rock Solid Images

Simultaneous Elastic Impedance Inversion

Rock Solid Images uses a pre-stacked constrained Stratigraphic Inversion solution for simultaneously extracting elastic properties from amplitude information distributed and reduced across the angle axis. The pre-stack constrained inversion is a high-end elastic inversion developed by the Institute Francais de Petrole (IFP), France in collaboration with consortium members. The inversion performs simultaneous inversion of angle stacks (three or more) for the generation of P and S wave impedance volumes and an optional density volume.

Wide-band acoustic impedance volume

This unique inversion was developed in response to limitations of current methods, procedures, and workflows and represents years of research and development. The main characteristics, features, and advantages of the inversion include the following:

1. The inversion can be applied to three or more angle stacks.
2. The inversion is implemented as a global and 3D model-based solution incorporating a multi-channel filter (non-diagonal covariance matrix) operator to constrain the impedance model.
3. The inversion operator incorporates a geologically-oriented filter following the micro-layers of geologic background models. These models are created from structural frameworks, well-logs, and geostatistical Kriging methods.
4. The inversion minimizes an objective function using an iterative gradient descent method in which AVO information, calculated from Aki & Richards modeling, can be used to explicitly specify confidence in the observed seismic data.
5. Constraints in the geologic term of the inversion objective allows us to control the confidence in each component (e.g. Ip, Is, Density) of the background data and the lateral continuity of the process. The application assumes a stronger correlation in the layer direction.
6. Extraction of a wavelet for each angle takes into consideration wavelet variations between angles.
7. Low frequency components are not merged, resulting in improved accuracy.
8. Signal-to-noise ratios in the seismic data and parameter uncertainties can be incorporated into the inversion, minimizing error in the results.
9. The process incorporates a unique and powerful inversion formulation for optimum results under a variety of geological and petrophysics/rock physics scenarios.

Rock Physics Transforms

Effective medium modeling provides a suite of rock physics transforms that transpose seismic impedances and their derivatives to reservoir properties such as clay content, saturation and porosity etc.