At the 2008 American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) Annual Convention and Exhibition in San Antonio, this month, TerraSpark Geosciences, a spin-out from the University of Colorado that was formerly the BP Center of Visualization has just announced ‘Insight Earth, a new seismic interpretation suite.
GIVC
Insight Earth’s technology and workflows derive from a five year Geoscience Interpretation Visualization Consortium research program with sponsorship from BHP Billiton, BP , Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Paradigm Geophysical, and Shell. A portion of the research has also been supported by ExxonMobil and Anadarko.
CASI
An early version of Insight Earth, dubbed Computer Aided Seismic Interpretation was presented at last year’s SEG (OITJ Oct. 07). Insight Earth builds on the CAD metaphor with automated fault extraction, surface wrapping and domain transformation to enhance geoscience workflows.
Stratal slice
A stratigraphic workflow leverages a 3-D transform to create a stratal-slice volume where all structural deformation has been removed from the 3-D data. Stratal slicing supports imaging and interpretation of the elements of depositional systems as complete 3-D surfaces, which are then transformed back as interpreted depositional surfaces in the original seismic volume.
Dorn
TerraSpark CEO Geoff Dorn told Oil IT Journal, ‘Insight Earth is the first interpretation package that supports volume interpretation of complete 3-D surfaces throughout. Workflows in the structure and stratigraphy modules reduce interpretation time and effort while improving the quality of faults, horizons and geobodies. This provides an efficient interpretation of the seismic volume allowing the interpreter to recognize and extract subtle faults, channels and other structural and depositional features that might have been missed with conventional interpretation tools.’
Complements
Dorn explained, ‘We don’t compete with the full scale visualization and interpretation systems that are currently on the market. Insight Earth complements these with compatible 3D processes. Traditional packages impose manually picked faults in 2D slices. Insight Earth simultaneously renders more than four volumes with attributes, automatically picking horizons and faults.’ The package includes tools for data management, structural interpretation, stratigraphic feature analysis and a modeling tool for principal surface extraction. The package is also amenable to 4-D seismic volume interpretation. Dorn’s team presented four papers at the AAPG on various techniques of reservoir characterization and modeling using TerraSpark’s technology. More from gwen@terraspark.com.
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