AEGC 2019 : From Data to Discovery – Perth , Australia 1 3 D inversion of electromagnetic logging-while-drilling data

Electromagnetic logging-while-drilling (LWD) data uses an array of multiple transmitter and receiver coils placed behind the drill bit to collect information about the electrical properties of the drilling environment (Sviridov et al., 2014; Dupuis and Denichou, 2015; Wu et al., 2018). This information is routinely inverted in one or two dimensions to recover a picture of the resistivity distribution around the borehole and to simplify the interpretation process (Abubakar et al., 2008, Bakr et al., 2017, Thiel and Omeragic, 2018). These lower-dimensional tools can provide excellent results when changes in the earth’s resistivity are also limited to one or two dimensions. However, these approaches can fail significantly when applied in the presence of 3D structures.