Intelligent seismic AVO inversion method for brittleness index of shale oil reservoirs

The brittleness index (BI) is crucial for predicting engineering sweet spots and designing fracturing operations in shale oil reservoir exploration and development. Seismic amplitude variation with offset (AVO) inversion is commonly used to obtain the BI. Traditionally, velocity, density, and other parameters are firstly inverted, and the BI is then calculated, which often leads to accumulated errors. Moreover, due to the limited of well-log data in field work areas, AVO inversion typically faces the challenge of limited information, resulting in not high accuracy of BI derived by existing AVO inversion methods. To address these issues, we first derive an AVO forward approximation equation that directly characterizes the BI in P-wave reflection coefficients. Based on this, an intelligent AVO inversion method, which combines the advantages of traditional and intelligent approaches, for directly obtaining the BI is proposed. A TransU-net model is constructed to establish the strong nonlinear mapping relationship between seismic data and the BI. By incorporating a combined objective function that is constrained by both low-frequency parameters and training samples, the challenge of limited samples is effectively addressed, and the direct inversion of the BI is stably achieved. Tests on model data and applications on field data demonstrate the feasibility, advancement, and practicality of the proposed method.