Brittleness of rock plays a significant role in
exploration and development of shale gas reservoirs.
Young’s modulus and Poisson’s ratio are the key parameters
for evaluating the rock brittleness in shale gas
exploration because their combination relationship can
quantitatively characterize the rock brittleness. The highvalue
anomaly of Young’s modulus and the low-value
anomaly of Poisson’s ratio represent high brittleness of
shale. The technique of pre-stack amplitude variation with
angle inversion allows geoscientists to estimate Young’s
modulus and Poisson’s ratio from seismic data. A model
constrained basis pursuit inversion method is proposed for
stably estimating Young’s modulus and Poisson’s ratio.
Test results of synthetic gather data show that Young’s
modulus and Poisson’s ratio can be estimated reasonably.
With the novel method, the inverted Young’s modulus and
Poisson’s ratio of real field data focus the layer boundaries
better, which is helpful for us to evaluate the brittleness of
shale gas reservoirs. The results of brittleness evaluation
show a good agreement with the results of well
interpretation.