the consortium for research in elastic wave exploration ... · crewes news volume 19, no. 3-7...

CREWES NEWS Volume 19, No. 3-7 Apr-July 2008

_____________________________________________________________________________________ This newsletter is available on the internet at: www.crewes.org 1

The Consortium for Research in Elastic Wave Exploration Seismology

In This Issue…

Gilgamesh: high-performance Linux cluster at CREWES.

CREWES students win SEG Challenge Bowl.

Robert Stewart moves south. A word from our new Director, Gary Margrave.

Dave Eaton becomes Associate Director.

New staff members and graduate student.

Ongoing research: land streamer field results.

Recent CREWES conference presentations.

Sponsors Meeting information.

The CREWES Project Department of Geoscience University of Calgary 2500 University Dr. NW Calgary, Alberta, CANADA T2N 1N4 Tel: (403) 220 8279 Email: [email protected] Website: www.crewes.org

Congratulations to Maria Quijada and Jason McCrank

Maria and Jason won the SEG Challenge Bowl match at the 2008 CSEG convention, defeating seven other teams to win an expense-paid trip to the 2008 SEG convention in Las Vegas. CN

Gilgamesh Linux Cluster CREWES has acquired a new computing cluster named Gilgamesh after the legendary Sumerian hero. The new cluster will greatly enhance our 3D numerical modelling and processing capabilities. CREWES Staff and students will be using Gilgamesh for testing 3D migration algorithms, migration of large 2D datasets, and inversion of seismic data to complex seismic models. Gilgamesh has 14 TB of storage on the main node. Each of the 18 worker nodes has two quad-core Intel CPU chips, 16 GB of RAM and 300 GB of local disk storage. The cluster has 152 processors, 304 GB RAM and 20 TB of storage in total. All nodes are running 64-bit CentOS 5 (Linux) as the operating system. Communication between nodes is via Gigabit Ethernet.

Funding for the cluster was provided by Robert Ferguson, RobStewart (CREWES), Gary Margrave, Don Lawton (FRP), Michael Lamoureux (POTSI). Hard-ware assembly and installation were facilitated by Arnold Wolfle from PowerByte Solutions using primarily Supermicro components. For more information, contact Rob Ferguson or Kayla Bonham. CN

Geophysics Graduate Courses: Fall of 2008 Goph 551, Seismic Theory and Methods, MWF 10:00 - 10:50, ES 054, Dr. E. S. Krebes

Goph 649 - (Glgy 649), Adv Petrophys Technique, MWF 15:00 - 15:50, ES 162, Dr. L. R. Lines and Dr. R. O. Meyer

Goph 687, Theory of Seismic Imaging, TueTh 9:00 - 10:15, CHE 114, Dr. R. J. Ferguson

Goph 699.11, Seismic Research Topics and Tools, Th 14:00 - 16:50, EDC 289, Dr. D. C. Lawton

Goph 699.17, Inverse Theory and Methods, MW 8:30 - 9:45, EDC 152, Dr. G. F. Margrave



Rob Stewart Moving South Robert R. Stewart will be moving from the University of Calgary to take a position with the University of Houston, effective August 1, 2008. Rob was instrumental in founding the CREWES Project in 1989, and has served as its leader and Director from its inception. As Professor at the University of Calgary in the Department of Geoscience for 21 years, he initiated and implemented important and varied research in elastic-wave seismology, supervising and inspiring numerous graduate students, many of whom carried seminal ideas into the exploration industry to its benefit.

Gary Margrave is the New CREWES Director We congratulate Dr. Gary Margrave on his appointment as the new Director of the CREWES Project, effective August 1, 2008. Gary has been a long-time Associate Director and has contributed significantly to the Project in his dual role as a researcher and teacher. CREWES looks forward to the continuation of effective and inspired leadership from Gary. Dr. Margrave is professor of geophysics in the Department of Geoscience and also an adjunct professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

Gary received his Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 1981 at which time he joined Chevron Corporation. After a variety of assignments as a technical and research geophysicist, he came to the University of Calgary in 1995 as a CREWES researcher. The following year he was appointed an adjunct professor in geophysics and in 1998 became an associate professor. He was appointed to full professor in 2006. In addition to his role in the Department of Geoscience, Dr. Margrave has served as Site Director for PIMS (Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences) where he has actively encouraged the growth of industrial mathematics. Under Dr. Margrave’s supervision, 15 graduate students have successfully completed their degrees (6 Ph.D.) and 8 are presently actively in the program. Dr. Margrave’s research interests include all aspects of exploration seismology with emphasis upon deconvolution, imaging, and inversion. CN

Rob will become a faculty member at the University of Houston as a Cullen Chair in Exploration Geophysics and assume duties as Director of the Allied Geophysical Laboratories (AGL). At Houston, he also has the opportunity to enhance his engagement with NASA and the space program. Rob has been nominated as an Adjunct professor at University of Calgary and will continue to advise CREWES graduate students and the Project for some months. As well, Rob aspires to lay the ground work for joint U. of Calgary and U. of Houston programs and exchanges to further connect two of the major centres of the North American energy community. We wish him great success in his new surroundings, and look forward to synergies and collaboration between the CREWES Project and an invigorated AGL. CN



Letter to the Sponsors of CREWES from Gary Margrave This year marks the 20th year of continuous operation for CREWES and it has been a memorable score of years. Over this period we have graduated 70 M.Sc. and 22 Ph.D. students and have seen our project grow in size and mature in research capability. In our present environment of over $130/bbl oil and increasing public interest in energy, the CREWES mandate seems more relevant and exciting than ever. Over the past two decades, our Sponsorship has remained consistent and supportive while providing essential guidance. We are honored and grateful to be in this position and to have the opportunities it affords. Dr. Robert Stewart, who has directed the project from the beginning, has accepted the Cullen Chair in exploration geophysics at the University of Houston and will move there effective August 1st. Rob’s leadership and buoyant optimism have been a blessing and we will certainly miss him; however, please be assured that CREWES is in excellent health. There are presently six geophysics faculty associated with CREWES (myself, Don Lawton, Rob Ferguson, Larry Lines, Dave Eaton, and John Bancroft) as well as a several others in allied fields. Additionally, Dr. Stewart will remain associated with CREWES and we plan to develop a close cooperation with the University of Houston. Together with our 12 staff and nearly 30 graduate students we are vigorously addressing many interesting and important topics in exploration seismology and we look forward to presenting our work this Fall at the annual Sponsors Meeting. We hope to see many of you there! Gary Margrave New Associate Director: David Eaton has been appointed Associate Director of CREWES, and we look forward to his involvement with the Project. Dave has been associated with CREWES previously. In 1992 he received his Ph.D. degree from the U of C, as one of the first CREWES students, supervised by Rob Stewart. Dr. Eaton became Head of the Department of Geoscience at the University of Calgary in October of 2007. Prior to that, he spent ten years at the University of Western Ontario where he was a faculty member in the Department of Earth Science. He has also worked with Arco Research and Technical Services and the Continental Geoscience Division of the Geological Survey of Canada. Dave’s current research focuses on seismicity and structure of the lithosphere and core, applications of seismic techniques to deep mineral exploration, and seismic wave theory. These projects seek to understand the architecture and geological evolution of the North American continent, as well as potential earthquake hazards in continental interior regions. His work also contributes toward the development of new and better techniques to image features buried deep within the Earth. Dave is past-president of the Canadian Geophysical Union (a national scientific organization dedicated to the advancement of geophysical sciences), associate editor for the Geological Society of America Bulletin and founding member of POLARIS (Portable Observatoris for Lithospheric Analysis and Research Investigating Seismicity), a $10 M infrastructure project funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Innovation Trust Fund. In 2006 he was appointed Honorary Professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, after having spent 6 months there on sabbatical in 2004/05.



New Staff Members: Kayla Bonham is CREWES' new HPC Programmer, hired to assist faculty, staff and students in making effective use of our new Gilgamesh High Performance Computing facility. She was born in Oshawa, Ontario, and grew up in Calgary. She has a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. in Computer Science, both from the University of Calgary. Her 1985 thesis explored the use of on-demand digital typography for viewing interactive documents, much as we do today on the World Wide Web.

Kayla has had an interesting career in technical programming in a variety of industrial application areas, involving SCADA, graphics, parallel distributed simulation, modeling and optimization techniques, and quite recently, resource sharing/scheduling algorithms in the University of Calgary's MACI Alpha cluster and WestGrid HPC projects. A bit of a scientific generalist, she is eager to obtain a working knowledge of geophysics and to help build analytic tools for looking at the structure of the earth's crust. She is excited about the prospect of exploring parallel 3D forward modeling algorithms with Drs. Rob Ferguson and Gary Margrave.

Kayla is an ardent bicyclist and dance enthusiast, and an occasional inventrix in wood, PVC tubing and duct tape! Laura Baird has joined CREWES as administrative manager, in preparation to assuming the role so ably filled by Louise Forgues, who intends to retire from CREWES later this year.

Laura received her Bachelor of Arts (major in Canadian History) in 1992. In the following 14 years she worked at a variety of businesses, and at the Tom Baker Cancer Centre. She joined what was then called the Department of Geology and Geophysics in 2006 as the Assistant to the Department Head. Laura is excited to now be employed by CREWES as its Administrative Manager and is looking forward to working with and learning from the directors, students and sponsors. Laura is also continuing her work on the 45th Anniversary Commemorative book for the Department of Geoscience, scheduled for completion this September. CN

New Graduate Student: Todor Todorov has joined CREWES as a PhD student with Dr. Gary Margrave. He was born in Bulgaria, and studied Applied Geophysics at the University of Mining and Geology, Sofia, Bulgaria. He moved to Canada and started his M.Sc. in 1996 as a student with CREWES at the University of Calgary. In 1997 he joined Hampson-Russel Software as a Project Geophysicist, doing Quantitative Interpretation using Seismic Inversion, AVO, Geostatistics, and Multi-Attribute Neural Network Analysis. Todor completed his MSc in 2000, and in 2002, joined Petro-Canada, where he has been working as a Quantitative Interpretation Geophysicist. Todor’s current research interests are Seismic Inversion, AVO, Geostatistics, Multi-Attribute Analysis, and Amplitude Friendly Processing. In his spare time, he enjoys playing soccer, hiking, and making his own wine. CN



A field comparison of 3-C land streamer versus planted geophone data Gabriela M. Suarez and Robert R. Stewart, CREWES Project, University of Calgary A multicomponent land-streamer survey was successfully conducted by the CREWES Project in an area located in the foothills of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. The land streamer experiment was composed of two multicomponent receiver lines located side-by-side: the 3-C land streamer and planted 3-C geophones. Comparison of raw shot gathers, amplitude spectra and stacked sections showed that the vertical channel data quality was found to be similar for both receiver types, while the radial channel data was found to have highest quality for the planted geophone. The bandwidth of the P-P reflections was consistent for the individual datasets. For the P-S case there was less consistency.

Raw shot gathers from conventional line (left), and land streamer system (right). Vertical channel (left), radial channel (center) and transverse channel (right).

Comparison of stacked sections from (a) the 2D land streamer line; (b) 2D planted-geophone line and (c) coincident 3-D cross-line. On the right hand side, we Identify some of the common reflectors for the land streamer and 3-D crossline stacked section (land streamer data are the noisier images). CN



Recent CREWES Conference Presentations CSPG•CSEG•CWLS 2008 Convention, Calgary, May 2008 1. Gabor Deconvolution: Surface-Consistent and Iterative. David Henley* and Gary Margrave 2. Searching for Sand in Saskatchewan: Manitou Lake 3C-3D Seismic Project. Roxana Varga* and Robert Stewart 3. Spring Coulee, Alberta: Geology, Production and Potential Hydrocarbon Bearing Zones. Lauren Ostridge* and Robert Stewart 4. Petrophysical and Seismic Signature of a Heavy Oil Sand Reservoir: Manitou Lake. Maria F. Quijada* and Robert R. Stewart 5. VSP and Well Logs from a Shallow Test Well. J. Wong*, S. K. Miong, L.R. Bentley and R. R. Stewart 6. An Empirical Study of the Generalized Fluid Method for Hydrocarbon Discrimination. Hong Feng*, Brian Russell and John Bancroft 7. Well Log Analysis and Seismic Attenuation in a Heavy Oilfield: Ross Lake, Saskatchewan. Zimin Zhang* and Robert Stewart 8. Fast Gabor Imaging with Spatial Resampling. Yongwang Ma*, Gary Margrave and Chad Hogan 9. High-Fidelity Time-Stepping for Reverse-Time Migration. Ben Wards*, Gary Margrave and Michael Lamoureux 10. Key Lessons from a Modeling and Migration Experiment. John Bancroft*, Hesham Moubarak and Don Lawton 11. Spherical Wave Model Tests of VSP-based Q-estimation Techniques. Arnim Haase* and Robert Stewart 12. Characterizing the Near Surface with VSP and Well Logs. Soo Miong*, R.R. Stewart, and J. Wong 14. Seismic Characterization of CO2 in Coals. Jason McCrank* and Don Lawton 15. Seismic Modeling of Acid-Gas Injection in a Deep Saline Reservoir. Charles Ursenbach* and Don Lawton 16. Elastic Wave Seismic Interpretation of Heavy-Oil Reservoirs. Larry Lines

17. A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall: When Solar System Vagabonds Meet the Earth. Robert Stewart 18. Seismic Modeling in 3D for Migration Testing. Gary Margrave* and Joanna Cooper 19. Simulations of Seismic Acquisition Footprint. Joanna Cooper*, Gary Margrave and Don Lawton 20. Microphone Applications in Seismic Exploration. Alejandro Alcudia* and Robert Stewart 21. Accelerometer vs Geophone Response: A Field Case History. Michael Hons*, Robert Stewart, Glenn Hauer, Don Lawton and Malcolm Bertram 22. 3D Seismic Surveys for Shallow Targets. Don Lawton*, Robert Stewart and Malcolm Bertram 23. Tutorial on Compressive Sampling. Michael P. Lamoureux 24. Tutorial on Compressive Sampling II. Michael P. Lamoureux 70th EAGE Convention, Rome, June 2008 1. Fast Trace Interpolation and Statics Application by Least Squares Inversion. R. J. Ferguson 2. Modelling Near-Field Effects in VSP-Based Q-estimation. A.B. Haase* and R.R. Stewart 3. Methods of Multicomponent Seismic Data Interpretation. R.R. Stewart 4. Laboratory Comparison of the Performance of Analog Geophones and MEMS Accelerometers. G. Hauer* (ARAM Systems Ltd), M. Hons, R. Stewart, and S. Spiewak 5. Accelerometer vs. Geophone Response-a Field Study. M. Hons*, R.R. Stewart, G. Hauer (ARAM Systems Ltd.), D.C. Lawton, and M.B. Bertram.

Near Surface 2008- 14th European Meeting of Environmental and Engineering Geophysics Krakow, Poland, September 2008 Well-logging and Near-surface Seismic Methods for Aquifer Detection. G.M. Suarez*, S. Miong, J. Wong, R. Stewart, A. Alcudia, H. Lu , K. Al Dulaijan Continued next page……..



Recent CREWES Conference Presentations (continued ) Symposium on the Application of Geophysics to Engineering and Environmental Problems -(SAGEEP), Philadelphia, April 2008 1. A 3D Seismic Survey for Mapping Shallow Targets. D.C. Lawton, R.R. Stewart*, and M.B. Bertram

2. VSP and Well Logs From a Shallow Test Well. J. Wong*, S.K. Miong, L.R. Bentley, and R.R. Stewart

Expanded abstracts for the above presentations can be found on the CREWES website. CN Sponsors Meeting Dates and Location The 2008 CREWES Sponsors Meeting will be held November 19-21 (the week after the SEG Meeting in Las Vegas) in Canmore, Alberta, at the Radisson Hotel and Conference Centre. We invite interested individuals from all of our sponsoring companies to attend. Please see the Sponsors Meeting page on the CREWES website for additional information (http://www.crewes.org/ForOurSponsors/Meeting/). We hope to see you at the meeting.

Contact Note: Readers wishing to contact staff and students should add the domain @ucalgary.ca to the usernames listed below.

Dave Henley: dhenley Han-Xing Lu: hxlu Dr. Rolf Maier: maier Dr. Joe Wong: wongjoe Dr. Peter Manning: pmmannin Graduate Students: Julie Aitken: jaitken Alex Alcudia: aalcudia Khaled Al-Dulaijan: kaldulai Abdullah Al-Shuhail: shuhail Matthew Allen: allenmd Salman Bubshait: sbubshai Joanna Cooper: jkcooper Pavan Elapavuluri: pkelapav Hong (Jason) Feng: hfeng Saul Guevara: seguevar Hussain Hammad: hihammadLejia Han: lehan Chad Hogan: cmhogan Michael Hons: msjhons

Zaiming Jiang: jianz Steve Lynch: lynchs Yongwang Ma: yongma Lauren Ostridge: ostridge Jason McCrank: mjmccran John Millar: jdmillar Soo Miong: skmiong Carlos Montana: rcamonta Maria Quijada: mfquijad Zoron Rodriguez: zarodrig Taher Sodagar: tmysodag Gabriela Suarez: suarezg Roxana Varga: rmvarga Ben Wards: bdwards Chuandong (Richard) Xu: cdxu Zimin Zhang: zzhan

Making Contact…

Directors: Dr. Robert Stewart: stewart Dr. Gary Margrave: margrave Dr. Don Lawton: lawton Dr. Larry Lines: lrlines Dr. Robert Ferguson: rjfergus Dr. David Eaton: eatond Associated Faculty Member: Dr. John Bancroft: bancroft Administrative Staff: Laura Baird: labaird Louise Forgues: forgues Research Staff: Kayla Bonham: bonham Dr. Pat Daley: pdaley Eric Gallant: egallant Dr. Arnim Haase: haaseab Kevin Hall: kwhall

the consortium for research in elastic wave exploration ... · crewes news volume 19, no. 3-7...

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