Diffraction enhancement through pre-image processing: Applications to field data, sarawak basin, East Malaysia

The future exploration plans of the industry is to find a small-scale reservoir for possible economic hydrocarbon reserves. These reserves could be illuminated by the super-resolution of full seismic data, including fractured zones, pinch-outs, channel edges, small-scale faults, reflector unconformities, salt flanks, karst, caves and fluid fronts, which are generally known as small scattering objects. However, an imaging approach that includes the diffraction event individually and images it constitutes a new approach for the industry; it is known as diffraction imaging. This paper documents results of a seismic processing procedure conducted to enhance diffractions in Sarawak Basin, using datasets from the Malaysian Basin to which no diffraction processing has been applied. We observed that the diffraction amplitude achieves maximum value when the detector is positioned vertically above the end point of the reflector, but drops off with increasing offset-distance from the point. Furthermore, the rate of attenuation of the diffracted wave energy is greater than that of the normal reflected wave energy in the same medium. In addition, the results indicate that the near offset and far angle stack data provide better diffraction events. In the other hand far offset and near angle stack provides the poor diffraction response. These results were revealed by angle-stacking of near-, mid-, and far-offsets data (4.5, 22.5 and 31.5 degrees) that was conducted to study amplitude and phase change of the diffraction curve. The final imaged data provides better faults definition in the carbonate field data. © 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.