The CO 2 storage operation at Sleipner in the Norwegian North Sea provides an excellent demonstration of the application of time-lapse surface seismic methods to CO 2 plume monitoring under favourable conditions. Injection commenced at Sleipner in 1996 with CO 2 separated from natural gas being injected into the Utsira Sand, a major saline aquifer of late Cenozoic age. CO 2 injection is via a near-horizontal well, at a depth of about 1012 m bsl, some 200 m below the reservoir top, at a rate approaching 1 million tonnes (Mt) per year, with more than 11 Mt currently stored.A comprehensive time-lapse surface seismic programme has been carried out, with 3D surveys in 1994, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008. Key aims of the seismic monitoring are to track plume migration, demonstrate containment within the storage reservoir and provide quantitative information as a means to better understand detailed flow processes controlling development of the plume in the reservoir.The CO 2 plume is imaged as a number of bright sub-horizontal reflections within the reservoir, growing with time ( Figure 1). The reflections mostly comprise tuned wavelets arising from thin (mostly < 8 m thick) layers of CO 2 trapped beneath very thin intra-reservoir mudstones and the reservoir caprock. The plume is roughly 200 m high and elliptical in plan, with a major axis increasing to over 3000 m by 2008. As well as its prominent reflectivity, the plume also produces a large velocity pushdown caused by the seismic waves travelling more slowly through CO 2 -saturated rock than through the virgin aquifer. This paper summarises some of the quantitative methods that have been applied to the Sleipner seismic datasets.
A B S T R A C TIn the Norwegian North Sea, the Sleipner field produces gas with a high CO 2 content. For environmental reasons, since 1996, more than 11 Mt of this carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) have been injected in the Utsira Sand saline aquifer located above the hydrocarbon reservoir. A series of seven 3D seismic surveys were recorded to monitor the CO 2 plume evolution. With this case study, time-lapse seismics have been shown to be successful in mapping the spread of CO 2 over the past decade and to ensure the integrity of the overburden.Stratigraphic inversion of seismic data is currently used in the petroleum industry for quantitative reservoir characterization and enhanced oil recovery. Now it may also be used to evaluate the expansion of a CO 2 plume in an underground reservoir. The aim of this study is to estimate the P-wave impedances via a Bayesian model-based stratigraphic inversion.We have focused our study on the 1994 vintage before CO 2 injection and the 2006 vintage carried out after a CO 2 injection of 8.4 Mt. In spite of some difficulties due to the lack of time-lapse well log data on the interest area, the full application of our inversion workflow allowed us to obtain, for the first time to our knowledge, 3D impedance cubes including the Utsira Sand. These results can be used to better characterize the spreading of CO 2 in a reservoir. With the post-stack inversion workflow applied to CO 2 storage, we point out the importance of the a priori model and the issue to obtain coherent results between sequential inversions of different seismic vintages. The stacking velocity workflow that yields the migration model and the a priori model, specific to each vintage, can induce a slight inconsistency in the results.
The Kevin Dome [Formula: see text] storage project, located in northern Montana, attempted to characterize the Duperow Formation as a potential long-term storage zone for injected [Formula: see text]. A multicomponent (9C) seismic survey was acquired for the Big Sky Carbon Sequestration Partnership over a portion of the Kevin Dome using P- and S-wave sources. Prestack migrated PP, PS, SH, and SV data sets were generated. We then applied several stratigraphic inversion workflows using one or several kinds of seismic wavefield at the same time resulting in joint inversions of each data set. The aim of our study is to demonstrate the benefits of doing quadri-joint inversion of PP-, PS-, SH-, and SV-wavefields for the recovery of the elastic earth parameters, especially the S-wave impedance and density. These are crucial parameters because they can help determine lithology and porefill in the reservoir characterization workflow. Because the inversion workflow always uses the original seismic data recorded in its own time domain, it is necessary to compute registration laws between PP-PS-, PP-SH-, and PP-SV-wavefields using a time shift computation procedure (warping) based on inverted S-wave impedances from inversion of a single wavefield. This generated a significant improvement over methods that rely on attempting to match trace waveforms that may have a different phase, frequency content, and polarity. Finally, we wanted to investigate the reliability of the quadri-joint inversion results in the Bakken/Banff Formations, which have less lateral geologic variation than the underlying Duperow target. This interval shares many of the geophysical characterization challenges common to shale reservoirs in other North American basins. We computed geomechanical parameters, such as Poisson’s ratio and Young’s modulus, which are a proxy for brittleness. Comparison of these results with independent laboratory measurements in the Bakken interval demonstrates the superiority of the quadri-joint inversion method to the traditional inversion using P-wave data only.
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