Peter Uzoho
The Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists (NAPE) has charged oil and gas operators to jettison working in silos and adopt integrated seismic inversion and forward seismic modeling to unlock more oil and gas reserves in mature and deepwater fields, and enable field development.
The charge was made at NAPE’s September Technical/Business Meeting in Lagos themed: “From Seismic to Value: Leveraging Seismic Inversion & Forward Seismic Modeling in Geomodeling to Enable Field Development,” with lecture delivered by ExxonMobil Geologist, Mr. Michael McGlashan and session chaired by Dr. Ifeanyichukwu Obi from Seplat Energy.
McGlashan said value delivery must integrate all available data — seismic, geologic concepts and dynamic behaviour — into a single workflow, warning against solutions that are geophysically plausible but geologically wrong.
“Even though it might be geophysically plausible, it’s not an acceptable solution because we haven’t integrated the geology,” he said, citing a reservoir where amplitudes connected across but dynamic data showed poor connectivity, requiring tuning of environment and geomorphology to match performance. On inversion scales, he explained seismic band gives relative impedance changes, absolute band includes low-frequency models to get actual elastic properties like VpVs and reservoir properties like net and porosity, while full band adds geostatistics for sub-seismic resolution that fundamentally changes flow behaviour. Understanding scale is critical to unlocking value.