Seismic monitoring in a desert environment: proven successes and the road ahead
Land seismic is inherently more complex than marine, even more so in arid desert environments. Geophysical techniques proven in a desert environment would ace everywhere else. Monitoring in a desert environment is extremely challenging due to shifting sand dunes and seasonal changes. First, I will walk you through actual field feasibility results with various source-receiver configurations. Then, picking the winner of hybrid acquisition with buried receivers and surface source, we dive into a 3D case study of monitoring CO2 injection in a carbonate land reservoir. I show how fantastic marine-like repeatability of 4% NRMS (Normalized Root-Mean Square error) can be achieved in complex desert environments when surveys are done in the same season. Scaling up such monitoring to more extensive areas demands Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) to optimize instrumentation costs. I show a deep seismic imaging field demonstration using shallow DAS vertical arrays and compare it to conventional 2D surface seismic. I conclude by explaining how DAS antennas can decrease the density of the monitoring array, thus providing a robust system for monitoring mass-scale CO2 sequestration.
Land seismic is inherently more complex than marine, even more so in arid desert environments. Geophysical techniques proven in a desert environment would ace everywhere else. Monitoring in a desert environment is extremely challenging due to shifting sand dunes and seasonal changes. First, I will walk you through actual field feasibility results with various source-receiver configurations. Then, picking the winner of hybrid acquisition with buried receivers and surface source, we dive into a 3D case study of monitoring CO2 injection in a carbonate land reservoir. I show how fantastic marine-like repeatability of 4% NRMS (Normalized Root-Mean Square error) can be achieved in complex desert environments when surveys are done in the same season. Scaling up such monitoring to more extensive areas demands Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) to optimize instrumentation costs. I show a deep seismic imaging field demonstration using shallow DAS vertical arrays and compare it to conventional 2D surface seismic. I conclude by explaining how DAS antennas can decrease the density of the monitoring array, thus providing a robust system for monitoring mass-scale CO2 sequestration.
