Time-Lapse Reservoir Monitoring at the Farnsworth CO2-EOR Field Using 3D Elastic-Waveform Inversion in Anisotropic Media

Session: Full-Waveform Inversion: Recent Advances and Applications [Poster]
Type: Poster
Date: 4/29/2020
Time: 08:00 AM
Room: Ballroom
Description: 

During the Development Phase of the U.S. Southwest Regional Partnership on Carbon Sequestration, anthropogenic CO₂ has been continuously injected since 2010 into the deep oil-bearing Morrow Formation of the Farnsworth Unit Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) field. The goal is to inject a million tons of CO₂ with approximately 94 Kilotons of CO₂ has been injected to date. The baseline and three repeat 3D-3C vertical seismic profiling (VSP) data were acquired from 2014 to 2017 for monitoring CO₂ injection/migration at the Farnsworth unit. The subsurface geology at Farnsworth EOR field shows vertically transverse isotropy (VTI), according to previous geological investigation and well-logging data analysis. We initially build the baseline velocity models by combining the deep region of the migration velocity model from the surface seismic data and the shallow region of the velocity models derived from the VSP data. We further improve the combined models using our anisotropic elastic-waveform inversion of the baseline VSP data. We then employ 3D anisotropic elastic-waveform inversion with total generalized p-variation regularization to invert time-lapse VSP data for changes of elastic-wave velocities in the reservoir.

Presenting Author: Xuejian Liu

Authors