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The key requirement to a safe storage of CO2 is to be constantly aware of the position of the injected, migrating CO2 in order to identify potential leakages. NORSAR has been granted a new research project by the Research Council of Norway (SafeCO2) aiming to improve the monitoring of CO2 storages using microseismicity, 4D seismic modeling and modeling of stress fields in the host rock.
CO2 injection in an underground structure introduces changes in the stress field and will evoke microseismic events. Continuous microseismic monitoring provides real-time event location estimates, thereby identifying the volumes that are seismically activated. The interpretation of the spatio-temporal occurrence of microseismicity can be interpreted by the propagation of CO2 and serves as input to time-lapse (4D) seismic modeling. The 4D modeling will reveal changes in the seismic sections caused by changes in the rock properties and will be compared with real 4D reflection seismics. Additionally, we will compute changes of the stress field due to variations in the geometry and rock properties of the CO2 storage using a static 3-D boundary element method as well as moment tensors calculated from the observed microseismic events. The mechanisms of the microseismic events will assist in modeling potential up-doming and stretching of the storage and its overburden and also serve as an alert system when the structural integrity of the storage is endangered.
Postdoc position
NORSAR will soon announce a 3-year postdoc position within this interesting and challenging project.
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