Carbon Storage Leak Detection via Seismic FWI and RTM: Different Surveys Analysis

Abstract

Marine seismic data processing is investigated to monitor possible leakages from the geological Carbon storage. Due to the high importance of storage permanence, a precise leakage monitoring strategy is crucial. Advanced seismic monitoring solutions should be used for this goal. The proficiency of these solutions for monitoring a Carbon storage leakage can be affected by shallower layers due to their structures, seismic wave attenuation, and leak size. Knowing the difficulty of this problem, we investigate the two popular seismic monitoring methods on Seismic data for monitoring Carbon leaks in different scenarios: Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) and Reverse-Time Migration (RTM). Finding the best survey strategy for monitoring carbon leaks is also significant. So, the results of different survey strategies, including vertical seismic profiling (VSP), cross-well, and surface, are compared to demonstrate the pros and cons of each strategy. The synthetic marine seismic data is calculated for different models, including Carbon storage and its leak. We used a set of realistic physical values for sedimentary rocks that are common for such a media. An elastic finite-difference time-domain scheme is used for the simulations. We applied FWI and RTM methods for monitoring Carbon Leaks using the seismic data. The FWI results demonstrate a good detection of the leakage areas that were clearer in the VSP survey than the others. Also, the performance of the FWI method was checked for different sizes of Carbon leaks. The results show the high capability of FWI as a solution to this problem. Besides, the RTM results show the high potential of the z-component of seismic data outperformed in showing the borders of the CO2 leakage. This point is more visible in the VSP results than in others. On the other side, the x-component of seismic data in the RTM results shows that it can demonstrate lateral reflectors better.