Depth Conversion is a topic which has forever been integral to the oil and gas community. Without it taking up an important part in the much wider Seismic Reflection method, it simply would not be possible to dig deep into the ground in order to obtain oils and gases from reservoirs.
Likewise, without Depth Conversion, it would be impossible to even locate these hidden oil and gas reservoirs in the ground beneath us. There’s drilling lots and lots of holes, yes – but how would you know where to drill? How would you know how deep to go? Essentially, the act of setting up an oil rig is something which demands the investment of millions upon millions, so it is very important that the process is started somewhere on the right track and you're not blindly feeling around in the dark.
There's the very obvious financial implications to consider, but there's something even more important - the safety of your workers. Different rocks require different methods to get through, and using the wrong drills on the wrong kind of rock can have disastrous effects. Furthermore, it's truly imperative to know just where the lay of the land lies.
The process of Depth conversion is all in aid of generating a full 3D model of the ground below in an area – a cross section of what is beneath our feet with accurate measurement. Initially, a geology company will use acoustic methods in order to look at what is beneath us. While indeed it’s much more complex than this – the bare bones of the procedure involves a machine is set up to blast an acoustic tone down into the ground. Depending on the types of rock below, the sound will be carried in a differing way. For instance, a porus rock will carry the sound much more differently than a denser rock – and as the sound returns, the volume of rocks below will mean that it will take differing amount of time in order to return.
What happens then is that this data is put into Depth Conversion Software, and a series of equations are employed to interrogate this data in order to eventually come out with a Depth Conversion model or velocity model – a 3D model which contains empirical knowledge of the velocities of which the rocks in area are arranged.
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