Challenges in Brazil pre-salt carbonate reservoir characterization: a realistic 3D synthetic study

Summary The ability to differentiate between good quality carbonate reservoir and low permeability limestone or volcano-clastic lithology using seismic data is key to successful exploration and development in the Brazil pre-salt play. However, the reservoir characterization is strongly coupled with the imaging challenges associated with the complex overburden and lateral property variations. In order to gain insights into this problem, we carefully build 3D elastic models for a synthetic study using real data acquisition parameters and simulated full-wavefield elastic data. The synthetic data generated via elastic full-wave simulation closely resembles the actual data challenges, even under ideal settings. The richness of this dataset and the complexity of the model provides a laboratory to test various workflows and approaches from conventional processing/imaging/ inversion to more complex imaging and reservoir characterization workflows.