DENVERA common complaint in the seismic industry is that engineers won’t listen to the geophysicists who try to tout the virtues of seismic technology. But at a morning technical session at the Unconventional Resources Technology Conference (URTeC) in Denver, the engineers came and listened as several speakers showed the benefits that a good high-resolution seismic survey can bring to their unconventional developments.

First off was Murray Roth, formerly of DrillingInfo, who noted that, unlike in conventional plays, seismic is used in some unconventional plays not so much for structural analysis but for information about the fabric and fluid of the rock. This information can be very helpful in drilling and completions planning and operations.

Roth broke these benefits down into a matrix that had drilling and completions across the top and planning and operations down the side. In drilling planning, for instance, seismic can aid in hazard avoidance, design constraint and sweet spot identification. In completions operations, seismic information can help optimize reservoir conductivity.

In an example from the Eagle Ford, a depth-converted seismic survey provided a good starting point for well planning because it highlighted fault hazards. Roth used the coherence attribute to create a fault proximity volume that he then color-coded to indicate the faults that most needed to be avoided while completing wells.

Acoustic impedance indicated rock properties in the data, with shales more prevalent to the west and siltstones more prevalent to the east. And multiple attributes can be combined to define facies trends, he said.

In the Bakken it is important to keep frack stages within zone, and seismic can help determine bed thickness prior to designing the completion, he said. And an examination of shear-wave data over producing wells helps explain the difference between better wells and worse wells by providing insights into the brittleness of the rock.

Advances in seismic technology are aiding with the uptake in unconventional plays, Roth said. With the Bakken intervals just 50 feet thick in some places, older seismic would not have been able to resolve the bed boundaries. But newer seismic surveys are resolving these benches as well as the underlying Three Forks benches.

“As operators evolve to multilevel development, they’ll get more value from seismic,” he said.

Jack Wiener from Halliburton Co. (NYSE: HAL) provided a case study on the value of 3-D seismic in drilling horizontal wells in the Niobrara. He noted that his group provides subsurface characterization, well planning, drilling and geosteering. “We’re on the front lines doing this every day,” he said.

In the case of the Niobrara, much of the value that seismic brings is structural since it’s a complex, highly faulted area. Additionally, it helps the operator orient the laterals correctly to avoid collisions since there are 10,000 vertical wells in the Wattenberg Field alone. It also provides an aid to land the lateral correctly in the target zone and keeping the lateral straight and the toe up.

Wiener’s group also is using seismic to identify sweet spots through inversion. And finally, he said, the use of seismic data allows for reduced rig time, as little as 6.7 days from spud to total depth in some cases.

This type of information is extremely helpful in the Niobrara, where about 1,100 laterals are drilled each year. “It is a factory,” he said, noting that operators might drill as many as 32 laterals per section off two or three pads. “The explosion of activity has been tremendous, and the need for accurate planning using 3-D seismic is critical,” he said.

Halliburton is using neural network technology to produce inversions of rock properties such as resistivity, porosity and clay content, he said. Unlike some of its shale cousins, the Niobrara, which consists of several clay benches encased in marl, is structurally driven, which makes seismic data extremely useful.

And the results speak for themselves—on wells that Halliburton has provided advice on, operators are landing their laterals in the C bench and producing from the B bench. “These wells have exceeded our expectations by 30% to 40%,” Wiener said. “Seismic is critical to this success.”