Seismic prediction and evaluation techniques for hot dry rock exploration and development

Hot dry rock is generally buried deep within the subsurface and exhibits high temperatures, hardness and density, with low porosity and a lack of permeable fluids. It is thus difficult to investigate and poses a high exploration risk. This paper emphasizes the role of seismic exploration in evaluating hot dry rock exploration by exploiting technical advantages, including strong penetration, high resolution and precise depth determination. Denoising and weak deep effective signal processing, unique processing methods (e.g. high-precision static correction, pre-stack noise attenuation, wide-angle reflection in weak signal areas and fine velocity analysis) are used for high-quality imaging of formations inside the hot dry rock geothermal reservoirs to address the difficulties of data static correction. The joint inversion/data fusion of seismic and other geophysical methods allow the realization of non-linear quantitative prediction and evaluation of hot dry rock reservoirs. The geothermal reservoir parameters, including lithology, physical properties and temperature, are predicted by integrating various geophysical attributes. Further, the development potential of the geothermal reservoir is accurately evaluated, and promising results achieved.