Multidisciplinary Analysis of Ground Movements: An Underground Gas Storage Case Study

Abstract

The paper presents a multi-physics investigation of the ground movements related to the cyclical and seasonal injection and withdrawal of natural gas in/from a depleted reservoir located in the Po Plain area, Italy. Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAr) data (from 2003) and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) data (from 2008) provided a full and coherent panorama of almost two decades of ground movement in the monitored area (more extended than the field boundary). The analysis of the acquired millimetric-scale movements together with the detailed geological analysis, both at reservoir and at regional scale, represents the focal point for understanding the investigated phenomena. Based on this information, a fully integrated and multidisciplinary geological, fluid-flow and geomechanical numerical modeling approach was developed to reproduce the main geometrical and structural features of the involved formations together with the poromechanics processes induced by the storage operations. The main achievement of the adopted methodology is a deep knowledge of the system and the involved processes, which is mandatory for the safety of the urbanized areas and the effective management of the underground resources.

Editorial for Special Issue “Monitoring Land Subsidence Using Remote Sensing”

“…Benetatos et al [9] presented a multi-physics investigation of the ground movements related to the cyclical and seasonal injection and withdrawal of natural gas in/from a depleted reservoir located in the Po Plain area (Italy) using the Persistent Scatterer Pairs InSAR (PSP-InSAR) approach and GNSS data. The authors developed an integrated geological, fluid-flow, and geomechanical numerical modeling approach to reproduce the main geometrical and structural features of the involved formations.…”

“…The ground surface movements due to anthropogenic activities have been deeply investigated, particularly in critical environments such as high-urbanized areas and coastal zones [9].…”

“…The monitoring of ground movements made great progress in the last decades with the development of Global Positioning System (GPS)-Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) [10] and Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) [11] technologies together with the use of different approaches, from analytical to 3D numerical, for the analysis of the involved physical processes [9]. Starting from the 2000s, further advances in the satellite-borne and in-situ technologies made the monitoring of Earth surface motions an easier and more common geodetic task [12].…”

“…The PSI and SBAS approaches can be successfully applied over many different ground targets such as buildings, infrastructures, outcrops, base soils, low-vegetated area, etc. [11], and in several research fields, such as tectonics and volcanology [15], landslides [10,11,16], clay deposits deformations [5,17], and groundwater/oil/natural gas depletion [9,18].…”

“…Despite the large advantages of the multi-temporal DInSAR methodology, the acquisition of ground-based data, mainly from leveling and GNSS techniques, is crucial for validation and integration of the satellite measurements. Nowadays, the land subsidence monitoring mostly relies on the integration between available and reliable InSAR data and sparse, but highly accurate, GNSS measurements, which are often compared to other geodetic observation methods [9][10][11][12]15,19,20].…”