Interpretation Extras

Upgrading Petrel

With each new Petrel release, there are a couple of things that are worth remembering:

  1. You will lose your System Settings. Make sure you revisit the Effects and Seismic Settings tabs and change the inputs here to whatever you had before. You really don’t want to load that big survey as a probe with your texture cache set to 512Mb do you?

  2. Export your Profiles before leaving your old version. Petrel introduced user-defined tool palettes in 2019. You can create any number of these and bounce between them easily when you change tasks. You can save them to use between projects. If you are not using them, you really should. The problem is that when you upgrade, the profiles don’t carry across so make sure you export the ones you want before upgrading your project, otherwise you’ll have to build them again.

Seismic Data Preparation

Having a set of seismic volumes with optimal dynamic range is an important starting point for any seismic interpretation project. In this video, we see how to load SEGY 3D data and how to choose appropriate amplitude clipping for the ZGY volumes we go on to create. We also learn how to manage the Vintages list.

While not exhaustive, the approach gives interpreters enough tools to generate a useful set of volumes from the SEGY data. I encourage the curious to visit the Opacity Tab should to the want to try a different approach to finding maximum clipping limits.

Some useful things to do in the (Petrel) Interpretation Window - and interpretation isn't one of them

I encourage interpreters to use the 3D window exclusively for seismic interpretation, regardless of whether they are interpreting 3D or 2D data. So where does that leave the Interpretation Window?

In this video, I show some of the things that work well in Petrel’s Interpretation Window:

Displaying well data and modelling results for presentations

Jump Correlation

2D reconstructions

Creating a Depogrid from a Volume Based Model (VBM) in 5 minutes (plus cooking time)

Once a structural model (VBM) has been created there are only a few steps required to produce a Depogrid. It’s something I’d like to do as part of the interpretation workshop that I run but the compute times are a little long.

Here I show the steps involved and the results of each step and skip all the compute downtime.

Machine Learning Derived Faults in Petrel and what to do with them

The folks at Schlumberger offered to run one of my teaching datasets through the Machine Learning Fault Extraction process on Delphi.

In this video, I show the results of the process, discuss its efficacy and provide a few strategies to incorporate the results into the interpretation stream.

The results are quite impressive and I look forward to seeing how the approach progresses over the next few years.

Editing Faults in the 3D Window

A VERY short video on editing faults in Petrel. Specifically, in the 3D Window.


Interpreters that are used to Petrel’s interpretation Window sometimes struggle to edit fault sticks in the 3D Window. This video shows that there are a number of ways to get the job done efficiently.

Adding a Lithology Track in Petrel

I don’t make a lithilogy track very often and so I’ve made this video to remind me, as much as anyone, how to get there quickly.

Ghost Curves for Well Correlation

Here is a short, simple video with the most important features of the Ghost Curve function for well correlation. Who says ghosts are scary?