Electromagnetic modeling and inversion application for oil and gas industry

An essential objective of collecting measurements in the oil and gas industry is to detect, locate and quantify the amount of oil and gas in the Earth subsurface. Electromagnetic measurements either at DC, induction, propagation, and dielectric frequencies play a central role because electromagnetic properties of hydrocarbon and water are very different. These electromagnetic measurements can be collected either from a single borehole (e.g., laterolog, induction logging, electromagnetic geosteering, and dielectric logging), multi-boreholes (e.g., cross-well electromagnetic, surface-to-borehole electromagnetic), or at surface (e.g., magnetotelluric, controlled-source electromagnetic). The process to convert electromagnetic measurements into electromagnetic property (e.g., resistivity/conductivity and permittivity) map of the subsurface is an ill-posed problem. Furthermore, due to the substantial differences in electromagnetic properties of Earth subsurface especially hydrocarbon and water, the inverse problem can only be properly solved using a full nonlinear inversion algorithm. In addition the number of data points can be very limited, hence making the ill-posed problem more severe.