A new approach to fractured damage zone evaluation using wavelet transform and variance attribute

Detailed evaluation of the faults and fractures has a great importance in evaluation of hydrocarbon prospects before any decision is made. Seismic data is the only type among lots of available data from geological studies to well logs and cores and to reservoir data that can provide a complete image of the subsurface structure. Therefore, lots of studies has been done to extract information for identifying the damaged zones from these data. Variance is one of the seismic attributes that can reveal information about discontinuities in the seismic cube. However, its capability depends on the input data quality. In this paper, a new approach based on hybrid application of the wavelet transform and variance analysis is presented. The method is applied on three-dimensional seismic survey from Malaysian basin and the results show how this method particularly improves the fracture identification.