Analysis of time‐lapse travel‐time and amplitude changes to assess reservoir compartmentalization

Fluid depletion within a compacting reservoir can lead to significant stress and strain changes and potentially severe geomechanical issues, both inside and outside the reservoir. We extend previous research of time-lapse seismic interpretation by incorporating synthetic near-offset and full-offset common-midpoint reflection data using anisotropic ray tracing to investigate uncertainties in time-lapse seismic observations. The time-lapse seismic simulations use dynamic elasticity models built from hydro-geomechanical simulation output and a stress-dependent rock physics model. The reservoir model is a conceptual two-fault graben reservoir, where we allow the fault fluid-flow transmissibility to vary from high to low to simulate non-compartmentalized and compartmentalized reservoirs, respectively. The results indicate time-lapse seismic amplitude changes and travel-time shifts can be used to qualitatively identify reservoir compartmentalization. Due to the high repeatability and good quality of the time-lapse synthetic dataset, the estimated travel-time shifts and amplitude changes for near-offset data match the true model subsurface changes with minimal errors. A 1D velocity–strain relation was used to estimate the vertical velocity change for the reservoir bottom interface by applying zero-offset time shifts from both the near-offset and full-offset measurements. For near-offset data, the estimated P-wave velocity changes were within 10% of the true value. However, for full-offset data, time-lapse attributes are quantitatively reliable using standard time-lapse seismic methods when an updated velocity model is used rather than the baseline model.