Frequency-domain inversion of marine CSEM data in one-dimensional vertically anisotropic structures

Abstract

The marine controlled-source electromagnetic (CSEM) method has proven to be an important addition to seismic imaging techniques in exploration of offshore hydrocarbon reservoirs and near-surface investigations. In inversion and interpretation of industrial CSEM data sets, this method can be used in a number of situations by assuming isotropy. However, the presence of electric anisotropy in the Earth's crust, due to thin layer interbedding or grain alignments in the sediments, can significantly alter the response measured by the EM receivers. Ignoring anisotropy in interpreting marine CSEM data may lead to distorted images of seabed conductivity structures, even misinterpretation.#br#In this paper, we present an inversion method for frequency domain marine controlled-source electromagnetic data generated by a titled dipole source in vertically anisotropic stratified media. This approach is based on the Gauss-Newton scheme. We extend and generalize the formulation of marine CSEM fields to calculation of the electromagnetic fields excited by arbitrarily oriented dipole sources. The partial derivatives of the electromagnetic fields with respect to both the horizontal and vertical resistivity are analytically calculated. Based on the relationship between the horizontal resistivity (ρh) and the vertical resistivity (ρv) of the inversion model, an adaptive selection method for regularization factors is proposed to balance the effects of the data misfit and the structural constraint.#br#The synthetic and real data inversion tests indicate that our inversion method can reconstruct the anisotropic resistivity of the overburden layer and the basement, and the burial depth, the thickness and the vertical resistivity of the reservoir layer can be well recovered. A better reconstruction can be obtained with multiple frequency and multiple component data sets. Combing inline and broadside geometry data sets can provide high resolution in reconstructing the burial depth of the reservoir layer and resistivity of the anisotropic basement.