The impact of inter-bed multiple attenuation on the imaging of pre-salt targets in the Santos basin off-shore Brazil

The carbonates in the pre-salt area of the Santos basin off-shore Brazil are good candidates for potential reservoirs of hydrocarbons. The presence of highly reflective stratified salt in this basin, combined with the focusing of energy due to the concave shape of these reflectors, causes relatively high amplitude inter-bed multiples to interfere with pre-salt reflectors. This multiple energy hampers the imaging and interpretation of these targets. We show that inter-bed multiple attenuation can be used to successfully remove the interference due to such multiples, thus improving the imaging of the pre-salt targets and facilitating improved interpretation. Using the water-bottom as the only inter-bed multiple-generating reflector turned out to be sufficient to attenuate most of the multiple energy. The attenuation of the multiples was done in the migrated domain.