CRS Stack for Reservoir Characterization - A Case Study on 3D Onshore Data

The Common-Reflection-Surface (CRS) stack has originally been developed as a tool to provide enhanced Zero-Offset sections for improved structural poststack imaging. Recent extensions of the CRS method, i.e., the Common-Offset CRS stack or prestack seismic data enhancement, allow to generate whole new enhanced and, if desired, regularized prestack datasets which lead to better structural prestack imaging. Their behaviour with respect to amplitude preservation, and thus to reservoir characterization, has, however, never been completely investigated. In this paper we present a case study on 3D seismic land data of moderate quality which demonstrates that the application of the CRS stack prior to prestack amplitude inversion may lead to improved inversion results (in terms of P-Impedance and Poisson's ratio). In addition, the enhanced quality of the prestack data does not only directly translates into cleaner inversion results, but does also stabilize the inversion workflow, particularly the wavelet extraction, itself.