Patent Document ID: 20040230379
Application ID: 10778864
Patent Flag: 0

Claim One:
1. A method for predicting whether increased coverage in a seismic survey of a petroleum reservoir is economically justified, where ranges of reservoir properties are known and dependency of reservoir economics on reservoir properties are also known, said method comprising the steps of: (a) selecting a first survey strategy and a second survey strategy, said two strategies differing in degree of coverage and therefore in cost; (b) selecting at least one reservoir property, said property being one that affects reservoir economics in a known way, and selecting a seismic attribute that is known to be a predictor of the at least one selected reservoir property; (c) generating a reservoir model for the reservoir in which a specific value is selected for each reservoir property from within the known range for that property; (d) using the reservoir model to generate a seismic trace; (e) computing the selected seismic attribute from the seismic trace; (f) distorting the computed attribute value with artifact information based on the first survey strategy; (g) using the distorted attribute value to predict the value of the at least one selected reservoir property; (h) using said known way and the predicted at least one reservoir property to predict the net economic value of petroleum that a well would produce under the specific reservoir model conditions; (i) repeating steps (f)-(h) for the second survey strategy; and (j) finding the difference between the well values for the two survey strategies by and comparing that difference to the survey cost difference.