Authors: Mark E. Willis, Glenn Wilson, Andreas Ellmauthaler, Xiang Wu, William Palacios, Dan Quinn, Halliburton

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) is a rapidly evolving conveyance-agnostic fiber-optic technology for cement, perforation, stimulation, and production monitoring and more recently, seismic acquisition such as vertical seismic profiling (VSP). Fiber-optic cables can be deployed permanently behind casing, on tubing, or via pumped-down installations or temporarily via coiled tubing, wireline, or slickline. The breadth of fiber-conveyance options significantly expands the opportunities for VSP acquisition compared to wireline-conveyed geophones. This talk will introduce a DAS VSP system where remote radio control of the seismic source is combined with multiple fiber-stretcher modules to enable the direct capture of GPS and seismic source information (e.g., zero break time, sweep) into the DAS measurements. Subsequent interrogation and processing enables stacking, correlation, and common mode noise rejection to deliver VSP data in SEGY format in real time. Comparisons are shown of DAS and geophone data sets using both compressional-wave (P-wave) and shear-wave (S-wave) seismic data, and their corresponding geophysical answer products. DAS seismic data is validated by examining the extracted slowness values, incident angle responses, angles, corridor stacks, and common-depth-point transforms. While there are tradeoffs in seismic data quality depending on the manner of fiber deployment, it is shown that conveyance-agnostic DAS can significantly expand the VSP operating envelope.

Speaker Biography: Mark Willis, Halliburton
Mark E. Willis is a Chief Scientific Advisor in the Borehole Seismic group at Halliburton. In his career he has performed research and development in Distributed Acoustic Sensing VSP technology, fracture identification using seismic data (time lapse VSP, microseismics and surface seismic scattering), interferometric imaging, Kirchhoff and reverse time depth migration, velocity model building, and borehole sonic waveform processing. Previous to joining Halliburton in 2011, he worked in various research technology, supervisory and management positions at Mobil Oil (17 years), ConocoPhillips (3 years), Cambridge GeoSciences (6 years), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (7 years).  He holds a B.S. in applied math and physics from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and a PhD in geophysics from MIT.