Abstract
For decades, the Alberta Basin has been the subject of several underground operations for mining and conventional and unconventional petroleum production. In addition, it is a potential locus for new underground operations such as geothermal energy production, storage of compressed air, and CO2 storage. Considering the importance of this region, a database of rock properties based on the existing wireline logs in more than 2200 wells in Alberta was developed by the author. This database includes rock properties such as porosity, density, shear and compressional wave velocities and dynamic elastic parameters for the formations intersected by these wells, along with the statistical analyses of these data to evaluate the reliability of the measurements. In this paper, it is shown that the data presented in this database might be utilized to study potential meaningful relationships between shear and compressional wave velocities for different geological formations in Alberta. These relationships can be extremely valuable because shear sonic logs are usually scarce compared to compressional sonic logs. Developing such correlations is common in the field of geophysics and they are widely used to estimate shear wave velocities from measured values of compressional wave velocities for various seismic interpretation applications and geomechanical characterization. Studies presented in this paper show that, for a notable number of geological formations in the Alberta Basin, strong linear correlations exist between shear and compressional wave velocities. As one of the major targets for conventional and unconventional oil recovery, the Viking Formation in Alberta was selected to demonstrate the capabilities of the developed database.