Publications

Shale plays have now become a trending topic in the oil and gas industry. Many companies have now developed several workflows to explore this unconventional energy. Sweetspot is a term that is used to express a lithology that is brittle enough to be fracked and is rich in Total Organic Content (TOC). This combination (brittleness and TOC) has become a key to many successful exploration shale plays in the United States. The Total Organic Content (TOC) can be performed through well measurement. Brittleness can be extracted by performing seismic inversion to obtain the lithology properties as input in geomechanical calculations. Meanwhile seismic inversion that is used to calculate brittleness needs far angle pre-stack seismic data to obtain the appropriate density value. As illustrated in this paper, we performed simultaneous inversion in three wells and applied the new approach to calculate geomechanical properties using the Young modulus’s density (Eρ) attribute to determine the brittleness when far offset data is unavailable. The rock properties change is also quantified using rock physics analysis to identify if the approach can be performed in shale plays with a thin laminated shale sand reservoir. The result shows that this approach can be used for 3D geomechanical calculation to determine the brittleness even if the far angle seismic data is unavailable. In addition, the rock physics analysis show that even in a thin shale sand laminated reservoir, the change of geomechanical properties is still identified with some limitations. In the end, we realized that this new approach was very powerful to identify the sweetspot and locate the fracturing zone for shale play exploration.