Towed Streamer EM data density and target recoverability

Towed Streamer EM is a recently introduced marine CSEM data acquisition system. The use of the towed system facilitates dense subsurface data sampling, which improves the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio, lateral and vertical resolution, thus provides the data quality required for imaging challenging targets in a shallow water environment. In this study, we investigate the image recoverability issue of the CSEM inversion using different source and receiver space distributions. It is evident that the fine-scale resistive structures can only be recovered from inverting the dense dataset. By adopting a staged integration workflow, where seismic, well log and Towed Streamer EM technologies make contributions with their individual strengths, we demonstrate that such an integration workflow provides a powerful tool for reservoir characterization, discriminating between lithology and fluid properties. It can serve as veritable inputs for reservoir volumetric analysis i.e. to estimate the volume of hydrocarbon in place.