Joint Electromagnetic Inversion with Structure Constraints Using Full-waveform Inversion Result

Abstract

Compared with the separated inversion of electromagnetic (EM) and seismic data, a joint inversion using both EM and seismic data reduces the uncertainty and gives the opportunity to use the advantage of each data. Seismic full-waveform inversion allows velocity information with high resolution in complicated subsurface. However, it is an indirect survey which finds the structure containing oil and gas. On the other hand, marine controlled-source EM (mCSEM) inversion can directly indicate the oil and gas using different EM properties of hydrocarbon with marine sediments and cap rocks whereas it has poor resolution than seismic method. In this paper, we have developed a joint EM inversion algorithm using a cross-gradient technique. P-wave velocity structure obtained by full-waveform inversion using plane wave encoding is used as structure constraints to calculate the cross-gradient term in the joint inversion. When the joint-inversion algorithm is applied to the synthetic data which are simulated for subsea reservoir exploration, images have been significantly improved over those obtained from separate EM inversion. The results indicate that the developed joint inversion scheme can be applied for detecting reservoir and calculating the accurate oil and gas reserves.