Time-lapse difference inversion based on the modified reflectivity method with differentiable hyper-Laplacian blocky constraint

Abstract

Time-lapse (TL) seismic has great potential in monitoring and interpreting time-varying variations in reservoir fluid properties during hydrocarbon exploitation. Obtaining the disparities of reservoir elastic parameters by inversion is essential for TL reservoir monitoring. Conventional TL inversion is carried out by stages without coupling processing and leads to inaccurate results. We directly use the differences in seismic data responses from different vintages, namely, difference inversion, to improve the results’ credibility. It may reduce the deviations of the subtraction of base and monitor inversions in traditional methods. Moreover, most existing studies involving prestack inversion methods use the Zoeppritz equation or its approximants, which failed to consider the wave-propagation effects. We have developed a new TL difference inversion based on the modified reflectivity method (MRM), in which the internal multiples and transmission losses are taken into consideration to fine-tune the characterization of the seismic wave propagating underground. The new method is modified on the basis of the reflectivity method making it feasible in TL difference inversion, and it is derived from the Bayesian theorem. For further delineating the boundaries between layers, the differentiable hyper-Laplacian blocky constraint (DHLBC) is introduced into the prior information of a Bayesian framework, which heightens the sparseness in the vertical gradients of the inversion results and leads to sharp interlayer boundaries of the difference parameters. Synthetic and field data experiments demonstrate that our TL difference inversion method has clear advantages in accuracy and resolution compared with the Zoeppritz method and MRM without DHLBC.