Targeting the thinly bedded and strongly heterogeneous tight sandstone gas reservoirs of the Shaximiao Formation in the Yingshan area of the Sichuan Basin, this study establishes an integrated workflow that combines high-fidelity 3D seismic processing with quantitative interpretation to address key challenges such as insufficient resolution of conventional seismic data under complex near-surface conditions and difficulty in depicting sand-body geometries. On the processing side, a 2D-3D integrated amplitude-preserving high-resolution strategy is applied. In contrast to conventional workflows that treat 2D and 3D datasets independently and often sacrifice true-amplitude characteristics during static correction and noise suppression, the proposed approach unifies first-break picking and static-correction parameters across 2D and 3D data while preserving relative amplitude fidelity. Techniques such as true-surface velocity modeling, coherent-noise suppression, and wavelet compression are introduced. As a result, the effective frequency bandwidth of the newly processed data is broadened by approximately 10–16 Hz relative to the legacy dataset, and the imaging of small faults and narrow river-channel boundaries is significantly enhanced. On the interpretation side, ten sublayers within the first member of the Shaximiao Formation are correlated with high precision, yielding the identification of 41 fourth-order local structural units and 122 stratigraphic traps. Through seismic forward modeling and attribute optimization, a set of sensitive attributes suitable for thin-sandstone detection is established. These attributes enable fine-scale characterization of sand-body distributions within the shallow-water delta system, where fluvial control is pronounced, leading to the identification of 364 multi-phase superimposed channels. Based on attribute fusion, rock-physics-constrained inversion, and integrated hydrocarbon-indicator analysis, 147 favorable “sweet spots” are predicted, and six well locations are proposed. The study builds a reservoir-forming model of “deep hydrocarbon generation–upward migration, fault-controlled charging, structural trapping, and microfacies-controlled enrichment,” achieving high-fidelity imaging and quantitative prediction of tight sandstone reservoirs in the Shaximiao Formation. The results provide robust technical support for favorable-zone evaluation and subsequent exploration deployment in the Yingshan area.
Li et al. (2026) studied this question.