Abstract:
Imaging of high-angle and sub-salt structures is one of the key and challenging aspects in current oil and gas exploration research. The data acquisition method of surface excitation and vertical well reception can be used to obtain information about high-steep structures. In addition, cross-well seismic data contains even richer information about high-steep structures. However, in actual acquisition, cross-well seismic surveys are costly. To achieve the accurate imaging of high-angle structures in complex anisotropic media, this paper presents an interferometric method. The VSP interferometry formula for VTI media is derived based on the reciprocity theorem. The principle of cross correlation is used to eliminate seismic waves with overlapping propagation paths in two shot records and generate the responses of a virtual source, which simulates a recording geometry moving closer to the targets for more information about high-angle structures. A comparative study is performed to check whether or not virtual source data are consistent with the VSP data acquired using the source and geophones in the borehole. The final image is the reverse time migration results of virtual source data. Numerical tests show that anisotropic migration is superior to isotropic migration in continuous imaging of high-angle structures with reduced noises. The proposed VSP interferometric method is a feasible solution to VTI media imaging and may effectively improve the imaging accuracy of high-angle and sub-salt structures.