Reducing uncertainty in geologic interpretation of petroleum reservoir containing thin layers requires increasing vertical resolution via appropriate advanced resolution enhancement methods. This problem was resolved here by introducing an alternative approach in resolution enhancement. Our method uses Gabor deconvolution (GD) combined with wavelet scaling. First, the seismic trace is transformed in the time-frequency domain using the Gabor transform. Subsequently, the Gabor magnitude spectrum of the seismic trace is smoothed to estimate the wavelet magnitude, which is then divided by the original value on the Gabor magnitude spectrum along the frequency axis to design a scale transformation filter. Finally, the filtered Gabor magnitude spectrum of the seismic trace is transformed back to the time domain using an inverse Gabor transformation. The result of using this technique is an increase of the dominant frequency, which produces a higher resolution of the seismic trace compared with using only the original GD. This method was applied to two synthetic and one field seismic data sets and compared with using only a GD. After applying the new approach, all three data sets indicate an extension in bandwidth (BW) and an enhancement in the resolution adequate for thin-layer seismic interpretation. When compared with the data sets using only a GD, the new approach produced comparable extension in the effective BW, while it pushing the dominant frequency to higher values. This allowed the imaging of many thin layers and geologic intervals in the field data example that could not be interpreted by the GD method.

Accurate fluid flow simulation in geologically complex reservoirs is of particular importance in construction of reservoir simulators. General approaches in naturally fractured reservoir simulation involve use of unstructured grids or a structured grid coupled with locally unstructured grids and discrete fracture models. These methods suffer from drawbacks such as lack of flexibility and of ease of updating. In this study, I combined fracture modeling by elastic gridding which improves flexibility, especially in complex reservoirs. The proposed model revises conventional modeling fractures by hard rigid planes that do not change through production. This is a dubious assumption, especially in reservoirs with a high production rate in the beginning. The proposed elastic fracture modeling considers changes in fracture properties, shape and aperture through the simulation. This strategy is only reliable for naturally fractured reservoirs with high fracture permeability and less permeable matrix and parallel fractures with less cross-connections. Comparison of elastic fracture modeling results with conventional modeling showed that these assumptions will cause production pressure to enlarge fracture apertures and change fracture shapes, which consequently results in lower production compared with what was previously assumed. It is concluded that an elastic gridded model could better simulate reservoir performance.