Fast Leveraging of Seismic Information over Large Areas - A Central North Sea Case Study

Being a mature basin, the UK Central North Sea area has benefited from the acquisition over time of extensive 3D seismic coverage, both on a speculative and proprietary basis. Maersk Oil UK has acquired data covering most of the Central North Sea over a 15,000 km2 area. Even though such a huge data set brings real advantages in facilitating exploration and new venture efforts, extracting the information and utilising it in a timely manner is challenging. In this work, the interpretation was carried out by applying a novel approach, which generates a 3D Relative Geological Time model directly from the seismic to leverage information contained in large-scale seismic data. The outputs of this workflow applied in a short time frame of 8 weeks were used for different applications such as shallow hazard assessment; strata-slicing along seismic attributes; delineation of geological features and basin modelling. This approach has revealed lots of potential from a regional standpoint for further more in-depth and focused interpretation work.