Monitoring the CO2 Plume Migration during Geological Carbon Storage
using Spatiotemporal Clustering
Abstract
Precision monitoring of the subsurface carbon-dioxide plume ensures
long-term, sustainable geological carbon storage. Carrigan et al. (2013)
and Yang et al. (2014) showed that electrical resistivity tomography
(ERT) can accurately map the evolution of the CO2 saturation during
geological carbon storage. To better monitor the CO2 plume migration in
a storage reservoir, we develop an unsupervised spatiotemporal
clustering to process the CO2 saturation maps derived from the ERT
measurements acquired over 80 days by Carrigan et al. (2013). Using
dynamic time wrapping (DTW) K-means clustering, four distinct clusters
were identified in the CO2-storage reservoir. The four clusters exhibit
a Davies-Bouldin (DB) index of 0.71, a Calinski-Harabasz (CH) index of
262791, and a DTW-silhouette score of 0.58. Unlike traditional
clustering methods, the DTW K-means incorporates a temporal distance
metric. Traditional clustering methods, such as Euclidean K-means,
agglomerative and meanshift clustering, exhibit a lower performance with
DB index of 0.83, 0.95, and 1.01, respectively, and CH index of 157866,
131593, and 69438, respectively. Subsequent statistical analysis
indicates that contrast stretching and fast-Fourier transform are strong
geophysical signatures of the spatiotemporal evolution of CO2 plume. We
also identified a strong correlation between injection flow rate and the
spatial evolution of regions with high CO2 content. Finally, the
previously computed spatiotemporal clusters were further clustered to
discover distinct temporal sequences emerging with respect to the
overall CO2 plume distribution in the subsurface. Six distinct temporal
clusters of CO2 plume evolution were detected over a period of 2 months.
A tensor-based feature extraction was critical for processing the ERT
data acquired over 80 days to capture both the temporal and spatial
components relevant to the evolution of CO2 plume in the storage
reservoir.