EAGE London: Challenges and benefits of elastic FWI

Challenges and benefits of elastic FWI in the pre-salt of Santos basin, Brazil by Bruno Pereira Dias, Petrobras

The talk will take place ONLINE only

Link to the webinar will be provided via e-mails to registered attendees: first e-mail will be sent two days before the event and the second one just 2 hours before the event. Do not register too late!

Agenda (UK time)

18:30-18:35 Introduction and Announcements

18:35-19:20 Challenges and benefits of elastic FWI in the pre-salt of Santos basin, Brazil

19:20-20:00 Q&A +informal discussion

Presenters

Bruno Pereira Dias holds a Ph.D. in Physics and has over 15 years of industry experience as a technical specialist in Geophysics at the PETROBRAS Research and Development Center (CENPES). His main areas of expertise include modeling, imaging, and inversion of seismic data. From April 2025 to March 2026, he served as a postdoctoral visiting researcher at the SEISCOPE group in Université Grenoble-Alpes, France, funded by PETROBRAS’ Human Resources Development Program. His focus is on developing innovative approaches to Elastic Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) and FWI Imaging.

Talk outline

The complexities of the pre-salt province of the Santos Basin, offshore Brazil, have made 3D Elastic Full Waveform Inversion (EFWI) a much needed and sought-after technique, as notable elastic property contrasts pose challenges to traditional acoustic FWI. To obtain an effective EFWI solution, we highlight the development of an optimized GPU kernel to enhance computational efficiency, and a robust time-shift-based objective function to improve convergence during the inversion. The results on a 3D ocean bottom node (OBN) data demonstrate significant improvements in the final velocity model, particularly in capturing sharp contrasts in the carbonate reservoir rocks and the top of salt. Overall, the elastic approach outperforms the acoustic FWI delivering higher-resolution models and more accurate velocity estimates.