Leveraging the Value of Multi-azimuth (MAZ) Seismic through MAZ-stack

The growing demand for energy requires that the search for hydrocarbons must extend into more challenging settings and become more reliant on technology, exposing the limitations of conventional 3D marine seismic. This decade has seen a major response to these challenges in the marine setting, in the form of Wide Azimuth seismic acquisition, like Multi-Azimuth, Wide Azimuth Towed Streamer, Nodes and OBC. These methods illuminate the sub-surface more completely, and sample problematic 3D noise across azimuth as well as offset for better attenuation during stack. These surveys are much more expensive to acquire and process, so it is thus important to lever all the value from the data. This paper discusses two seismic processing options to lever additional value from MAZ data. The first, MAZ-Stack, has been developed to weight up signal in areas of poor illumination, in other words, to favour strong signal over weak/absent signal. This approach has the effect of reducing fold and so decreases random noise suppression. The second technique, 3D warping, extends an existing method to align sub-surface seismic volumes, and so minimize registration errors between the azimuth stacks which result from imperfect knowledge of the sub-surface velocity field.