Elastic Impedance Connolly

PROCESSING
ACQUISITION
Elastic impedance
PATRICK CONNOLLY, BP Amoco, Houston, Texas, U.S.
I t is now commonplace for 3-D data sets to be processed erty of EI that the level decreases with increasing angle.
as partial offset volumes to exploit the AVO information At this well, the sands are predominantly class III and
in the data. However, there has been significant asymme- so have slightly higher amplitudes at 30 than at normal
Downloaded 12/11/14 to 192.100.180.234. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/
try in the way these volumes could be calibrated and incidence. This can be more clearly seen in Figure 2 in
inverted. The amplitudes of near-offset, or intercept, stacks which the EI log has been scaled to have approximately
relate to changes in acoustic impedance and can be tied to the same shale baseline as the AI log. When the sands are
well logs using synthetics based on acoustic impedance class II, a more dramatic difference is evident between the
(AI) or inverted, to some extent, back to AI using poststack AI and EI logs.
Coordinated by Guillaume Cambois
inversion algorithms. However, there have been no sim- The seismic data around Foinaven suffer from very
ple analogous processes for far-offset stacks. strong peg-leg multiples. Even after demultiple, the sig-
The symmetry can be largely restored using a function nal-to-noise ratio of the near-trace data is often poor, espe-
I call elastic impedance (EI). This is a generalization of cially from the class II events, whereas the far-offset data
acoustic impedance for variable incidence angle. EI pro- are generally of good quality. EI allows the well data to be
vides a consistent and absolute framework to calibrate tied directly to the high-angle seismic which can then be
and invert nonzero-offset seismic data just as AI does for calibrated and inverted without reference to the near off-
zero-offset data. EI, an approximation derived from a lin- sets.
earization of the Zoeppritz equations (Appendix, part 1), Figure 3 shows part of the EI(30) log from another
is accurate enough for widespread application. Foinaven well overlain on an inverted 30 angle stack. The
As might be expected, EI is a function of P-wave veloc- data were inverted using a constrained sparse spike algo-
ity, S-wave velocity, density, and incidence angle. To relate rithm for which the EI log provided the basis for the con-
EI to seismic, the stacked data must be some form of angle straints and was used to QC the result.
stack rather than a constant range of offsets. There are sev- An EI log provides an absolute frame of reference and
eral ways of constructing suitable data sets by either care- so can also calibrate the inverted data to any desired rock
ful mute design or by linear combination of intercept and property with which it correlates. In the case of Foinaven,
gradient functions. (Part 2 of the Appendix reviews these a strong correlation was found between EI(30) and hydro-
methods.) carbon pore volume, and this relationship was used to
EI was initially developed by BP in the early 1990s to estimate the in-place volumes for the field from the inverted
help exploration and development in the Atlantic Margins 30 seismic volume.
province, west of the Shetlands, where Tertiary reservoirs Figure 4 shows a section from the inverted 30 volume
are typified by class II and class III AVO responses. Figure used to design the trajectory of the first high-angle devel-
1 shows a suite of logs from the Foinaven discovery well opment well. The oil sands correlated closely with the
drilled in 1992. The 30 elastic-impedance log, EI(30), is areas of low elastic impedance. The EI volume was used
broadly similar in appearance to the acoustic-impedance to design the trajectories of all subsequent development
log although the absolute numbers are lower; it is a prop- wells.
Figure 1. Comparison of an AI curve with a 30 EI curve for the Foinaven discovery well 204/24a-2.
438 THE LEADING EDGE APRIL 1999 APRIL 1999 THE LEADING EDGE 0000
The EI formula is an approximation and may not be between. This allows the user to construct as high an angle
applicable in all circumstances; however, the loss of accu- stack as is stable and then to calibrate or invert it using the
racy is easy to calculate and minimize (Appendix, part 3). equivalent EI log.
In most situations, more general seismic data quality issues Because of the difficulties and uncertainties of con-
and particularly uncertainty in the estimation of incidence structing angle stacks, a method of quality-controlling the
angle are probably larger than errors in the implied reflec- results using available well data is important. EI provides
tivity from the EI values. a simple mechanism to produce synthetic seismograms for
Estimating Poissons ratio from seismic data has variable incidence angle. A Vp term can be factored out of
prompted much comment in the literature and was the sub- the EI expression and the remaining angle-dependent
ject of a workshop at SEGs 1998 Annual Meeting. One expression can be used in place of the density log in con-
approach is to invert a 90 angle stack (see part 2 of the ventional synthetics software (equation 1.3). The Vp log is
Appendix) which, in theory, has amplitudes that are then calibrated with a time-depth relationship in the usual
approximately proportional to changes in Poissons ratio. way.
However, the construction of quantitatively accurate Figure 5 shows near- and far-offset ties to a west of
Poissons ratio stacks is notoriously difficult because of sen- Shetlands well. There is much variation of amplitudes
sitivity to residual moveout and bandwidth variations.
EI can provide an optimum compromise. Part 4 of the
Appendix shows how one variant of EI has values equal
to AI at normal incidence and to (Vp/Vs)2 at 90 (this being
closely related to Poissons ratio) with a smooth transition
Figure 2. Detail from Figure 1, but with the EI(30)

curve scaled so that the shale baseline is
approximately the same as the AI curve. This shows Figure 3. Part of an EI(30) log overlain on the inverted
the percentage decrease in impedance at the oil-sand 30 angle stack. The log was used to constrain a con-
interface is greater than 30 at normal incidence, conventional poststack sparse spike inversion and to QC
sistent with the class III response of these sands. the result.
Figure 4. A section through the inverted 30 volume, showing the path of the first development well. The location
of oil-bearing sands encountered by the well correlates with the areas of low elastic impedance (yellow).
with offset in this area, and the two angle stacks are quite of an AI and EI curve is often simpler to relate to the seis-
different. Despite this, both well ties are of good quality. mic response than, say, Vs or Poissons ratio logs. An exam-
A principal benefit of EI within BP has been its value ple is shown in Figure 6 that is a standard BP petrophysical
as a communication and integration tool. EI allows AVO display from the Gulf of Mexico.
information to be displayed in a way that can be under- With this type of data established within a petrophys-
stood more intuitively by nongeophysical specialists. It is ical database the EI concept can help with more general
easily incorporated into petrophysical systems allowing rock-property studies. Figure 7 shows AI/EI crossplots of
AVO information to be communicated throughout the data from 19 Gulf of Mexico wells for shales, brine, and
earth-science community. EI can be used to display rock- oil sands. By measuring average impedance values we
property data, either from wireline or core measurements, can quickly estimate the AVO response of various lithol-
in a way that can be directly related to far-offset stacks. ogy combinations. This particular data set, for example,
Shear-wave data are now recorded routinely in many shows that the percentage increase in amplitude from 0-
wells so the calculation of, say, an EI(30) log within any 30 for a shale/brine sand interface (~18%) is almost exactly
petrophysical package is straightforward. The combination the same as for a shale/oil sand interface (~17%). So, for
Figure 5. Low- and high-angle synthetic ties for a west of Shetlands well. The left side of the display is a conven-
tional AI synthetic match to a 10 angle stack. The right side is a 30 EI-based synthetic tied to a 30 angle stack.
Figure 6. Standard petrophysical display for a Gulf of Mexico well (MC619-1). The two right tracks show the AI
and EI(30) curves. In this example, the upper sand would be expected to generate little response at normal
incidence and a tough-peak pair at far offsets.
these data, AVO gradient would be a poor fluid indicator. In each case the normalized standard deviations of the
However, looking at average values only tells part EI(30) data are less than those of the AI data. The area of
of the story. Figure 8 shows simplified, Gaussian fre- overlap between the oil and brine-sand values at 30 is less
quency curves of the AI and EI distributions of the three than half that at normal incidence. I find that many data
lithologies. sets have this characteristic (i.e., that EI values are more
Figure 7. AI against EI(30) crossplots of data from 10 Gulf of Mexico wells for shales (left), brine sands (center), and
oil sands (right). Average AI and EI values can be read from the histograms and from these reflection coefficients
for any lithology combination at normal and 30 incidence. These data show almost the same percentage increase in
amplitude for a shale/brine-sand interface as a shale/oil-sand interface.
Figure 8. Gaussian curves equivalent to the histograms of Figure 7 showing the distribution of AI and EI(30) values
for the three lithologies. The normalized standard deviations for the shale, brine-sand, and oil-sand AI data are
0.15, 0.12, and 0.11. They are 0.10, 0.08, and 0.09 for the EI data.
Figure 9. The relationship between oil saturation and AI (left) and EI(30) (right) from core sample measurements
from the Foinanven Field.
uniform than AI values for a given lithology). This implies tion, using no specialist software and with minimal increase
that most forms of amplitude analysis would be less in effort. This allows for routine extraction of quantitative
ambiguous at higher incidence angles than lower. AVO information from large 3-D volumes. LE
Finally, an example of using EI to display the results
of core measurement data. The Foinaven Field is the sub- Acknowledgments: The examples are the work of many people. Id espe-
ject of a 4-D, time-lapse seismic experiment and various cially acknowledge and thank current and former BP Atlantic Margins
core sample measurements have been made to calibrate colleagues Mike Cooper, Dave Cowper, Robert Hanna, Mike Currie, and
the results. Figure 9 shows the relationship between oil sat- Dave Lynch and our joint venture partners Shell UK for support and
encouragement. Also Ed Meanley, Sue Raikes, Terry Redshaw, Stan
uration, AI, and EI(30). Clearly, the far offsets are more sen- Davis, and Wayne Wendt for additional help and both Shell and BP
sitive to changing saturation than the near ones. Amoco for permission to publish this paper.
In summary EI is pragmatic technology. It allows at
least first-order AVO effects to be incorporated routinely Corresponding author: Patrick Connolly, connolpa@bp.com
into seismic and rock-property analysis and interpreta-
Appendix
1) Derivation. Equation 1.1, a well known linearization of

the Zoeppritz equations for P-wave reflectivity, is accurate
for small changes of elastic parameters for subcritical substituting K for Vs2/Vp2 and rearranging
angles.
(1.1)
where
but sin2tan2 = tan2 sin2, so
Note that had we used only the first two terms of (1.1),
and where then the above and following expressions differ only by
changing the tan2 to sin2. We substitute again lnx for
x/x;
now if we make K a constant we can take all terms inside

the s;
and similarly for the other variables (NB. For ease of nota-
tion, the bars will be omitted from the averaged Vs2/Vp2
ratios.)
We require a function f(t) which has properties analo-
gous to acoustic impedance, such that reflectivity can be
derived from the formula given below for any incidence and finally we integrate and exponentiate (i.e., remove the
angle differential and logarithmic terms on both sides), setting
the integration constant to zero:
(1.2)
Call this function EI (elastic impedance), and use the alter- An alternative form, with a Vp term factored out, can be
native log derivation for reflectivity which is accurate for used for generating synthetics (see main text).
small to moderate changes in impedance;
(1.3)
2) Angle stacks. The ideal angle stack has amplitudes that

and so, relate to a specific incidence angle over a long time win-
dow and has enhanced signal to noise. In other words it
should approximate as closely as possible a band-limited
constant angle reflectivity sequence. The construction of
an angle stack requires knowledge of the relationships
between offset and incidence angle and between angle
and amplitude. These are both potentially complex areas
but if we restrict ourselves to first-order approximations
then angle stacks can be calculated with little extra effort
beyond conventional stacking.
These approximations limit applicability to data for
which the two-term moveout and Dix equations are valid
and for which amplitudes are proportional to sin2, (where
is incidence angle). This effectively means layer-cake
geometry, offset less than depth and incidence angle less

than 30-35. We are also limiting ourselves to an isotropic
medium. This is probably the most severe limitation;
increasing anisotropy will distort raypaths and alter AVO
behavior. Correctly balanced, true prestack amplitudes
are also assumed.
The following expression relates incidence angle to off-
set given the above constraints.
Figure A1. Finite angle stack weighting functions.

(2.1)
An intercept stack is seen to be similar to a near-offset
where = incidence angle, stack and a midangle stack is similar to a far-offset stack.
x = offset, Higher angle stacks are projections beyond the range of
t0 = zero offset two way time recorded data which must exploit the difference between
vi = interval velocity near and far offsets. This will inevitably be very sensitive
vr = rms velocity to residual moveout and phase and bandwidth variations
which explains some of the difficulty in trying to estimate
There are essentially two methods of constructing angle Poissons ratio values from P-wave seismic data.
stacks; the first uses linear combinations of intercept and The second way to produce an angle stack is to design
gradient, and the second uses averaging between appro- an appropriate muting function. Equation 2.1 can be inte-
priate muting functions. The former can also be reformu- grated with respect to x to give the average value of sin2
lated as a weighted stack. for a range of offsets stacked between x1 and x2.
As is well known from Shueys classic paper, ampli-
tudes are linear with sin2 up to about 30-35. Therefore,
using (2.1) we can estimate sin2 for each sample through
a CDP time slice and fit a regression line through the
amplitude values up to the maximum appropriate angle.
Numerous AVO attribute values can then be constructed
from this line: the intercept, the gradient, Poissons ratio
stack (the value at 0=90) or the value for any intermedi-
ate angle (called Finite Angle Stack within BP). This entire (2.2)
process can be efficiently programmed to run almost as
quickly as a conventional stack. Because amplitude is linear with sin2, the average ampli-
Perhaps a more intuitive way to look at this process is tude of the stack will also correspond to this angle.
to rearrange it as a weighted stack. The simple linear Either the outer or inner mute can be fixed and then
regression formula for intercept and gradient formula can its pair calculated. For example, for a high-angle stack the
be rearranged as weighting functions as follows, where X outer mute could be a 35 mute calculated from equation
is sin2, Y is the equivalent amplitude value, and N is stack 2.1 possibly combined with the maximum offset-depend-
fold. ent upon acquisition geometry. The inner mute to provide
some target angle could then be calculated from equation
2.2. In practice a fixed angle can usually only be achieved
over some limited window. An example of this process is
shown in Figure A2. (Note that the final muting functions
should be smoothed to some extent.)
This second method of angle stack construction has the
advantage that only conventional stacking software is
required. Its disadvantages are that it assumes regular
A linear combination of these will provide a weighting
geometry and is only capable of producing stacks at a lim-
function for any desired angle stack A().
ited range of angles. The regression approach is far more
flexible.
Of all the errors implicit in the EI/angle-stack approach
almost certainly the largest is the estimate of incidence
angle. Every effort should be made to minimize this and
Figure A1 shows a typical suite of weighting functions for certainly this should include reestimating the angles at each
one time slice to output a range of finite angle stacks from velocity control point when constructing angle stacks.
0 (intercept) to 90 (Poissons ratio). This more closely
shows the similarity between this process and partial 3) Accuracy. The derivation of the EI formula (Appendix,
stacking. part 1) requires the Vs/Vp ratio in the exponentials be kept
10000
15000
20000
25000
30000
35000
40000
10000
12000
14000
16000
5000
2000
4000
6000
8000
0
0
two-way-time (ms)
two-way-time (ms)
Figure A2. A typical stacking velocity function and its Dix interval equivalent. From these and equation 2.1, an
outer 35 mute to exclude the nonlinear AVO is derived. Then, from equation 2.2, an inner-trace mute is calculated
to give an average stack angle of 25.
constant for the entire time series (or constant within any This expression can be used to calculate the rms level of
system in which absolute comparisons are being made). the error for the entire log. As an example, the error was
This reduces the accuracy of the derived reflectivity com- calculated for the 204/24a-2 data and is displayed in Figure
pared with that obtained directly from equation 1.1 for A3 as signal-to-noise for a range of K values.
which the Vs/Vp ratio can be set to be the average across This provides a mechanism to obtain the optimum K
each interface. Again substituting K for Vs2/Vp2, if K is value for any data set. In this example the signal-to-noise
the difference between the true local value and the of 12 should be more than adequate for most purposes.
constant value, then from equation 1.1 the error in the For comparison the signal-to-noise from ignoring AVO
reflection coefficient is and using an AI approximation is 1.3 which would be
unacceptable for quantitative analysis. In general errors
introduced by the EI approximation will probably be much
smaller than those arising from the estimation of incidence
(3.1) angle.
It is possible to derive a correction to an EI log such
that the derived reflectivity is accurate for a locally aver-
aged K value rather than the constant value. The correc-
tion is, however, recursive, dependent on the overburden
and hence loses the prime advantage of the EI function
that it depends only on instantaneous local properties. If
K is the locally averaged value and K is the constant value
the following expression is calculated for each sample.
(3.2)
R is the ratio of the correction for the (i-1)th sample to the
ith sample so the correction works by calculating the run-
ning sum of this expression and then multiplying the EI
values by this factor (Figure A4).
Figure A3. The ratio of the rms level of the R(30) 4) High-angle inversions. Both methods for constructing
reflectivity from (1.1) divided by the EI error term angle stacks (outlined in Appendix, part 2) are based on
from (3.1) for a range of K values for the 204/24a-2 the first order AVO equation whereas the EI derivation
data. The maximum signal-to-noise is about 12 and (Appendix, part 1) is based on the second-order equation.
corresponds to a K value of about 0.21. Below 30, this makes little difference, but if we wish to
Figure A4. An example of the application of the EI correction (3.2) to the 204/24a-2 data. The effect of the correction
is small for this example.
calibrate higher-angle stacks constructed using the regres-

sion line projection method then we should use the first
order EI1 variation which Ill denote with the subscript. As
noted in Appendix 1, this is the same as the second-order
version but with the tangent in the Vp exponential term
changing to a sine.
(4.1)
Ive already shown that EI(0) = AI and from 4.1 we can
now see that if we let K = 0.25 then EI1(90) = (Vp/Vs)2. The
absolute levels of EI1(90) will depend on exactly which
value for K is being used but relative amplitudes should
always be approximately proportional to (Vp/Vs)2. And of
course (Vp/Vs)2 can be easily transformed into Poissons
ratio which in appearance is a very similar function.
Figure A5 shows a suite of EI 1 functions for the
204/24a-2 well with the gamma and log resistivity curves
for reference and showing comparisons with (Vp/Vs)2 and
Poissons ratio curves. The curve values have all been nor-
malized. The optimized K value of 0.21 was used for the
EI calculations, but the EI1(90) is almost identical to the
(Vp/Vs)2 curve.
EI 1 curves therefore provide a smooth transition
between AI and (Vp/Vs)2 functions. In principle a corre-
sponding angle stack could be constructed and inverted
for any desired angle but in practice these will become
increasingly unreliable at higher angles. The EI concept,
however, allows an optimum balance to be chosen.
Figure A5. Comparison of a suite of EI1 curves with

(Vp/Vs)2 and a Poissons ratio curve for the 204/24a-2
well. Gamma and log resistivity included for refer-
ence. The EI1 curves form a continuum between an AI
and a (Vp/Vs)2 curve.

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PROCESSING

Figure 2. Detail from Figure 1, but with the EI(30)

1) Derivation. Equation 1.1, a well known linearization of

but sin2tan2 = tan2 sin2, so

now if we make K a constant we can take all terms inside

2) Angle stacks. The ideal angle stack has amplitudes that

geometry, offset less than depth and incidence angle less

Figure A1. Finite angle stack weighting functions.

calibrate higher-angle stacks constructed using the regres-

Figure A5. Comparison of a suite of EI1 curves with

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