Satinder Chopra

Satinder Chopra
Latest company	SamiGeo Consulting Ltd.
Membership	SEG, CSEG, CSPG, CHOA, EAGE, AAPG, APEGGA, and TBPG
MSc university	Himachal Pradesh University

Satinder Chopra is the founder and President of SamiGeo Consulting Ltd., located in Calgary. With 40 years of experience as a geophysicist, he specializes in processing, special processing, and the interactive interpretation of seismic data for reservoir characterization. His research interests focus on techniques aimed at characterization of reservoirs. Chopra earned M.Sc. and M.Phil. degrees in physics from H.P. University in Shimla, India. He began his career in 1984 with Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC), India’s premier national oil company, and worked there until 1997. In 1998, he moved to Calgary to join CTC Pulsonic, which evolved into Scott Pickford and later Core Laboratories Reservoir Technologies. In November 2004, he became part of Arcis Seismic Solutions in Calgary, which was acquired by TGS in 2012. He served as the Chief Geophysicist (Reservoir) at TGS, Calgary until July 2020. In September 2020, he established SamiGeo Consulting Ltd. Chopra has held prestigious roles as the CSEG Distinguished Lecturer for 2010–2011, the AAPG/SEG Fall Distinguished Lecturer for 2011–2012, and the EAGE e-Distinguished Lecturer for 2014–2015. He has published nine books (authored two, coauthored five, of which three are with Kurt Marfurt, and coedited two) and more than 525 papers and abstracts. He has served as the Chief Editor of the CSEG RECORDER, a member of the editorial boards for SEG’s The Leading Edge and Geophysics, and as the Chairman of the SEG Publications Committee. Currently, he is the editor of the AAPG Explorer Geophysical Corner, the Canadian Journal of Exploration Geophysicists, and the Chief Editor of GEOHORIZONS, the premier journal of the Society of Petroleum Geophysicists (SPG), India. He has been honored with numerous awards from ONGC, CSEG, SEG, AAPG, and Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA). His recent accolades include the 2024 AAPG Honorary Membership Award, the 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Petroleum History Society, the 2021 Roy O. Lindseth CSEG Medal Award, the 2019 AAPG Distinguished Service Award, and the 2017 EAGE Honorary Membership Award. He was the honoree at the 2017 CSEG Symposium, received the 2016 APEGA Fellow of Engineers Canada Award, and won the SEG Best Poster Award for his paper, Churning seismic attributes with principal component analysis, at the 2014 SEG Annual Meeting in Denver. Other honors include the 2014 CSEG Honorary Membership Award, the APEGA Fellow Geoscientists Canada and the 2013 Frank Spragins Technical Award, the 2013 AAPG Jules Braunstein Award for the Best Poster Presentation, the 2012 GeoConvention Best Poster Award as coauthor for the work, Determination of Elastic Constants using Extended Elastic Impedance, the AAPG George C. Matson Award for the Best Oral Presentation in 2010, the Top 10 Paper Award in 2009, the Best Poster Award in 2008, the Best Paper Award in 2007, and the 2005 CSEG Meritorious Services Award. Along with his colleagues, he has also been recognized with the CSEG Best Poster Awards from 2002 to 2005. In addition to all the above accolades, Satinder’s presentations at the SEG have been judged to be in the Top 30 of all the presentations made at the Annual Meeting in 2008, 2010, 2015, and 2017. He is a member of SEG, CSEG, CSPG, EAGE, AAPG, and APEGA. He is an APEGA Professional Geophysicist.

Fall 2011 Joint AAPG/SEG Distinguished Lecturer

Seismic detection of faults and fractures

Characterization of natural faults and fractures in the subsurface is essential to the design of effective drilling programs and exploitation of tight reservoirs as well as the improved performance of conventional reservoirs. The presence of naturally occurring fracture networks can lead to unpredictable heterogeneity leading to sweet spots and bypassed pay within many reservoirs. If they can be mapped, fractures may provide high permeability pathways that can be exploited to extract reserves stored in a low permeability rock matrix. The need to detect and characterize fractures has motivated the development of new and rejuvenation of older geophysical technologies concerned with or related to fractures. Some of the commonly used methods are the azimuthal AVO method, the use of coherence and curvature seismic attributes, wide azimuth data, multicomponent data and passive seismic techniques. Azimuthal AVO has been used in the industry and has proved to be a promising tool when the assumptions for its application are met. Seismic attributes such as coherence and curvature can be used for both qualitative and quantitative interpretation of fractures. Both these methods will be discussed in the talk. One useful feature, which is not practiced routinely in our industry, is to make use of these two methods together in that unified displays of attributes from these methods should be used for interpretation of fractures.

In general, curvature is an excellent measure of paleo deformation. With an appropriate tectonic deformation model, structural geologists can predict where the fractures were formed. However, since their formation, such fractures may have been cemented, filled with overlying sediments or diagenetically altered. Furthermore, the present-day direction of minimum horizontal stress may have rotated from the direction at the time of deformation, such that previously open fractures are now closed, while previously closed fractures may now be open. For this reason, prediction of open fractures requires not only images of faults and flexures provided by coherence and curvature coupled with an appropriate model of deformation, but also measures of present day stress provided by breakouts seen in image logs and seismic anisotropy measures.

To reach this stage, the input seismic data used for the generation of coherence and curvature attributes should be relatively noise free and should have optimum frequency content for meeting the desired goals. Certain types of noise can be addressed by the interpreter through careful structure-oriented filtering or post migration footprint suppression. Other problems such as multiple contamination or poor imaging due to inaccurate velocities or irregular geometries require that the data go back to the processing team for remediation. Another common problem with seismic data is their relatively low bandwidth. For detection of fractures, the seismic data should have an optimum frequency bandwidth and for this reason frequency enhancement of the input seismic data should be undertaken. I will emphasize the application of a couple of the newer methods for fracture detection. These will include the spectral decomposition-based inversion for seismic reflectivity, a process that removes the time-variant wavelet from the seismic data and extracts the reflectivity to image thicknesses below conventional expectations of seismic resolution. In addition to enhanced images of thin reservoirs, these frequency-enhanced inverse images have proven very useful in mapping subtle onlaps and offlaps, thereby facilitating the mapping of parasequences and the direction of sediment transport.

Finally I will illustrate some of the latest curvature measures such as Euler curvature for observing fracture lineaments, and structural curvature versus amplitude curvature. Applications of additional recent newer volumetric attributes such as reflector convergence and reflector rotation about the normal to the reflector dip have shown promise and will be touched upon. While the former attribute is useful in the interpretation of angular unconformities, the latter attribute determines the rotation of the fault blocks across discontinuities such as wrench faults. Such attributes can facilitate and quantify the use of seismic for stratigraphic workflows and for large 3D seismic volumes.