Where can Full Waveform Inversion Have the Biggest Impact in the Exploration and Production Cycle

Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) has recently emerged as one of the most exciting new techniques in the seismic industry thanks to its potential to deliver very detailed velocity models. Most of the examples shown in literature are based on FWI applications for imaging purposes and where the starting velocity models for the inversion are derived by several iterations of traveltime tomography. While this is indeed valid we question whether this is the most effective use of FWI. We present two cases where we see greater values derived from FWI: velocity estimation for imaging (low frequency range) starting from a smooth RMS velocity model, and velocity estimation for direct interpretation (high frequency range).