Testing of a Permanent Orbital Surface Source and Distributed Acoustic Sensing for monitoring of unconventional reservoirs: preliminary results from the Eagle Ford Shale
The effective monitoring of hydraulic fracturing in unconventional oil and gas production requires tools to quantify elastic property variations even in the absence of microseismic activity. To track the subtle time-lapse variations in reservoir properties during such activities, monitoring techniques with high repeatability and high resolution, both spatially and temporally, are required. Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) is a rapidly maturing fiber-optic technology for low-cost, permanent, high density in-well monitoring. Surface Orbital Vibrators (SOVs) are an inexpensive fixed rotary seismic sources that offer the opportunity to frequently interrogate the subsurface with energies comparable to vibroseis sources. We present a field VSP test, conducted in the Eagle Ford play, pairing an SOV source recorded by DAS behind casing in a deviated well to better evaluate the potential of the technology set for unconventional reservoir monitoring. We demonstrate the data processing workflow for reservoir monitoring using SOV-DAS system. We analyze the data characteristics of SOV-DAS system, including S/N (signal to noise ratio) characteristics and source repeatability. High-quality P- and S- wave reflections, as well as mode conversions, are visible in the vertical section. In addition, clear P-P reflections are also observable along the horizontal well sections. Time-shifts with a mean value 10 μs between different datasets demonstrate the high repeatability for the semi-permanent SOV source, which is crucial for time-lapse analysis. We also apply reflection imaging on both P- and S- to reveal reflection depths. In a first-of-its-kind deployment, we implemented a rotating SOV with a slewing bearing and discuss the possibility to optimize S-wave construction along the horizontal well with specific SOV orientation directions. Our preliminary results show that the combination of repeatable surface sources such as SOVs with DAS has significant potential for providing a low-cost approach for high resolution seismic monitoring of unconventional reservoirs.