Tech talk: Energy absorption analysis

Petroleum News Alaska Staff

Energy absorption analysis, the technology Escopeta said it used to identify the existence of hydrocarbons in the East Forelands structure, extracts frequency information from a cascading series of small time windows along the seismic trace. It then employs a series of steps to compare the spectra in successive time windows to detect anomalous loss of high frequency energy as a function of time, said Eugene Lichman and Glenn Jones for Alliant Geophysical in a report on Escopeta’s Kitchen area prospect.

The report cautioned that non-geologic effects on rapid high frequency loss in the data must be considered, such as frequency variation due to tuning or thin-bed effects, which may have no connection with intrinsic attenuation in the reservoir.

Improved modeling techniques must be developed, the report said, for predicting high frequency seismic energy loss, whether attributable to attenuation, tuning, scattering, or other mechanisms.