Heavy Oil Reservoir Seismic Characteristics during Thermal Production: A Case Study

Most production methods of heavy oil involve thermal production. However, it is challenging to delineate the thermal-affected zone due to complex reservoir conditions. With steam injected, the heavy oil viscosity drops; the reservoir density and velocity decrease accordingly, causing changes to seismic impedance. Moreover, the oil-and-water viscosity ratio and permeability show the difference with changing temperature, indicating that the reservoir’s ability to transmit seismic waves would also be temperature-dependent. Therefore, the seismic responses and attenuation characteristics of the steam chamber can be helpful to monitor the steam-affected zone. We introduce an improved viscoelastic model to approximate the heavy oil reservoir during thermal production, and use the frequency-space domain finite difference algorithm to simulate the seismic wave-fields. Numerical results demonstrate that this model is applicable to a wide temperature range, and can effectively reveal the seismic characteristics of the steam chamber. Through analyzing the propagation differences of seismic waves under different temperatures, it is concluded that the attenuation coefficient, root-mean-square amplitude difference and amplitude ratio of PP-wave and PS-wave under different conditions can reveal the temperature variation in the steam chamber, with which it is possible to detect the steam chamber spatial distribution.