Summary
Fractured reservoirs represent important hydrocarbon reserves but are often associated with low recovery rate. The goal of increasing extraction of oil and gas from such reservoirs will be greatly increased by having information about subsurface fractures such as fracture orientation, fracture spacing, and fracture compliances. We have previously shown that, when seismic acquisition has full azimuth, a double focusing Gaussian beams (DFGB) method is effective at determining fracture orientations for multiple fracture sets, the fracture spacing of each fracture set (even if the fractures are irregularly spaced), and the relative fracture compliance of each fracture set as a function of position in the reservoir. This information can be used to build reservoir fluid flow models for enhanced oil recovery. Here, we investigate the resolving power of the DFGB method for the case of limited azimuth seismic acquisition. A numerical example shows that our method can provide spatially dependent information on fracture parameters using data collected in current marine seismic streamer surveys.
