A decade of technology advancement in seismic processing: A case study from reprocessing legacy sparse OBC data in Kashagan Field

Ceaseless advancements in seismic data processing technology and workflow enable the extraction of increasing amounts of subsurface information essential for derisking and optimizing natural resource development. The Kashagan oil field, one of the world's largest carbonate reservoirs, is faced with significant development optimization challenges due to a combination of complex geology and suboptimal seismic data coverage. The latest processing technologies were applied to the 2001-2002 vintage sparse ocean-bottom cable data and produced step-change improvements over the 2010-2011 legacy processing and imaging results. Such significant image uplift is representative of technology advancements over the span of a decade fully leveraging the newly preprocessed input data, including (1) an integrated model building workflow, (2) adaptive application of full-waveform inversion, (3) geologically constrained reflection tomography, and (4) least-squares imaging. The new seismic results improved the structural and stratigraphic imaging of multiple layers of shallow carbonates, mitigated fault shadow and other complex overburden effects, increased the resolution of subsalt carbonate reservoir features such as karst and internal fractures, improved well marker depth misfit, and ultimately influenced the placement of upcoming wells and reservoir development plans. Further improvements in seismic imaging would be feasible with a modern acquisition of more densely sampled seismic data, which would allow the full potential of the latest seismic processing technologies and workflows to be unlocked. © 2024 by The Society of Exploration Geophysicists.