In 2016, Peter Duncan presented a two-day overview of microseismic monitoring as he understood it at that time. Over the last four years the application of microseismic data, particularly to the development of unconventional resources through hydraulic fracturing, has made great strides particularly through integration with other reservoir geology and engineering practices. In this course, Duncan will try to bring you up to date on what has been accomplished using case histories of recent projects.

The course is designed for practicing geoscientists and geoscience students who desire a better understanding of the principles and limitations of both current and emerging technologies involved in subsurface parameter estimation and imaging. The material is designed to help readers better understand how contemporary velocity estimation methods work, and what approximations are involved in obtaining computationally tractable solutions. The evolution of the industry’s approaches to building earth models with ray tomography and full waveform inversion is covered, as are some of the emerging possibilities for replacing imaging techniques with direct subsurface parameter inversion methods. The approach will be mostly non-mathematical, concentrating on an intuitive understanding of the principles, demonstrating them via case histories.