Abstract
Large-scale injection of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the earth started in
the 1980’s for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Geological sequestration
(injection and storage) of industrial CO2 to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions began in the 1990’s using saline aquifers and depleted
hydrocarbon reservoirs. Today the two processes are being co-optimized
as Carbon Capture, Use and Storage (CCUS). As a result, the time-lapse
seismology community has gathered about 20-30 years of experience
monitoring CO2 injection projects of various types and sizes, primarily
using controlled active seismic sources and Large-N receiver arrays. To
help achieve IPCC projections of 2C global temperature change versus CO2
emissions, society would need to scale up current CO2 injection rates by
a factor of 250x from 40 Megatons to 10 Gigatons, per year. CCUS
regulations for Monitoring and Verification requirements are in various
stages of development around the world, including the EU CCS Directive,
US EPA, and international ISO standards. A typical commercial-scale CCUS
project injects > 1 Mt CO2/yr for > 20 years.
After CO2 injection ceases, the project operator must further monitor
the post-injection CO2 plume behavior to establish regulatory compliance
for 20-50 years in order to “handover” the project to the regulator.
After handover, the regulator is then responsible for monitoring the
post-injection plume stability for another 20-30 years (in the US there
is no handover, the operator maintains all project and monitoring
responsibilities). These CCUS requirements imply that we will need to
monitor CO2 projects, both during and after injection, for 50-100 years
or more. We simply do not have experience in the time-lapse seismology
community with such long-term monitoring periods, in terms of data
acquisition, processing, imaging, and minimizing environmental footprint
and costs. It would certainly not be practical nor affordable to conduct
a full-scale 4D seismic survey every year, for 100 years. These
long-term monitoring requirements thus present both challenges and new
research opportunities. I will present some experimental results I have
obtained over the past decade to help develop long-term, near real-time,
continuous monitoring of CO2 injection projects using ambient seismic
noise (ASN).