Abstract

One of the major challenges that time-lapse seismic will face is the monitoring of carbonate reservoirs. Refraction time-lapse has the potential to overcome this challenge However, there are some challenges which should be met. Some of these opportunities are discussed in this paper. Understanding the amplitude behavior at critical offset and its relation to the maximum amplitude offset is one important challenge. Another challenge is guided waves within the water layer that disturb a clean detection of the refracted events from the reservoir. It is also important to measure at sufficiently large offset as well as using a relatively dense offset sampling in order to detect subtle changes in critical offset. The focus on repeatability will probably continue since it is a common challenge for both conventional and refraction time-lapse seismic.