Joint Inversion in Hydrocarbon Exploration

Abstract

This chapter investigates the particular challenges for joint inversion in the context of hydrocarbon exploration. It reviews the current literature and introduces interesting approaches that have been developed in the context of hydrocarbon exploration and could potentially be used in other application areas as well. Joint inversion methods incorporating petro physical models of the reservoir can directly yield quantities of interest such as porosity and permeability, but have to be carefully tuned to the area under investigation. The chapter presents two detailed joint inversion case studies, one for subsalt imaging and one for sub basalt imaging. It also covers emulation of the forward calculation, a concept that can be applied generally in joint inversion, but has only been applied in hydrocarbon exploration. For a successful joint inversion, it is necessary to invert each dataset, construct different coupling approaches, and evaluate the impact on the final results.