Title: Seismic Monitoring at the Farnsworth CO2-EOR Field Using Time-Lapse Elastic-Waveform Inversion of 3D-3C VSP Data

Abstract

During the Development Phase of the U.S. Southwest Regional Partnership on Carbon Sequestration, supercritical CO₂ was continuously injected into the deep oil-bearing Morrow B formation of the Farnsworth Unit in Texas for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). The project injected approximately 94 kilotons of CO₂ to study geologic carbon storage during CO₂-EOR. A three-dimensional (3D) surface seismic dataset was acquired in 2013 to characterize the subsurface structures of the Farnsworth site. Following this data acquisition, the baseline and three time-lapse three-dimensional three-component (3D-3C) vertical seismic profiling (VSP) data were acquired at a narrower surface area surrounding the CO₂ injection and oil/gas production wells between 2014 and 2017 for monitoring CO₂ injection and migration. With these VSP datasets, we inverted for subsurface velocity models to quantitatively monitor the CO₂ plume within the Morrow B formation. We first built 1D initial P-wave (V_p) and S-wave (V_s) velocity models by upscaling the sonic logs. We improved the deep region of the V_p and V_s models by incorporating the deep part of a migration velocity model derived from the 3D surface seismic data. We improved the shallow region of 3D V_p and V_s models using 3D traveltime tomography of first arrivals of VSP downgoing waves.more » We further improved the 3D baseline velocity models using elastic-waveform inversion (EWI) of the 3D baseline VSP upgoing data. Our advanced EWI method employs alternative tomographic and conventional gradients and total-variation-based regularization to ensure the high-fidelity updates of the 3D baseline V_p and V_s models. We then sequentially applied our 3D EWI method to the three time-lapse datasets to invert for spatiotemporal changes of V_p and V_s in the reservoir. Our inversion results reveal the volumetric changes of the time-lapse V_p and V_s models and show the evolution of the CO₂ plume from the CO₂ injection well to the oil/gas production wells.« less

Authors:

Liu, Xuejian ;

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• Search DOE PAGES for ORCID "0000-0001-9322-5601"

Huang, Lianjie; Gao, Kai; Bratton, Tom ;

• Search DOE PAGES for author "Bratton, Tom"
• Search DOE PAGES for ORCID "0000-0001-6548-7145"

El-Kaseeh, George; Ampomah, William; Will, Robert; Czoski, Paige; Cather, Martha; Balch, Robert; McPherson, Brian

Publication Date:

Sat May 06 00:00:00 EDT 2023

Research Org.:

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)

Sponsoring Org.:

USDOE Office of Fossil Energy (FE); USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)

OSTI Identifier:

1972886

Alternate Identifier(s):

OSTI ID: 1974983

Report Number(s):

LA-UR-23-22822
Journal ID: ISSN 1996-1073; ENERGA; PII: en16093939

Grant/Contract Number:  

89233218CNA000001; FE0031684; FC26-05NT42591

Resource Type:

Published Article

Journal Name:

Energies

Additional Journal Information:

Journal Name: Energies Journal Volume: 16 Journal Issue: 9; Journal ID: ISSN 1996-1073

Publisher:

MDPI AG

Country of Publication:

Switzerland

Language:

English

Subject:

42 ENGINEERING; CO2 monitoring; elastic-waveform inversion; enhanced oil recovery; Farnsworth; geologic carbon storage; time-lapse seismic monitoring; vertical seismic profiling (VSP)