Imaging for carbon storage

THE SCHOOL OF Computational Science and Engineering’s (CSE) Seismic Laboratory for Imaging and Modeling (SLIM) at Georgia Institute of Technology, led by Professor Felix J. Herrmann, has been devoting imaging research towards Geological Carbon Storage (GCS), an emerging solution to help combat climate change.

“SLIM has been widely recognised as a world leader in the next generation of seismic acquisition, data processing, imaging, and monitoring for the oil and gas industry,” said Herrmann, “SLIM has recently made developments in the fields of compressive sensing and machine learning to drive innovations in wave-based inversion with applications in seismic monitoring.”

GCS is a process of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in deep, underground reservoirs. SLIM’s research in seismic imaging assists engineers to monitor carbon dioxide dynamics stored in the Earth’s subsurface. This includes detecting potential leaks in underground reservoirs, which minimises risks in GCS projects.

One obstacle inhibiting GCS is difficulty in conducting large-scale seismic imaging that is accurate, timely and cost-effective. SLIM provides a novel approach that maps seismic images associated with one background model to another through velocity continuation. SLIM’s velocity continuation method is cheaper and faster than existing algorithms because it avoids creating new images from scratch. This potentially opens the way for large-scale, uncertainty-aware monitoring.

Another challenge in monitoring GCS is predicting how stored carbon dioxide will behave underground due to reservoir fluid properties like temperature and pressure. To address this problem, SLIM developed a model that uses a neural operator in place of a fluid-flow simulator. According to this study, the neural operator can forecast behaviour of stored carbon dioxide at a fraction of computational cost of conventional numerical simulations.

“By gradually shifting gear to carbon storage monitoring with seismic techniques, SLIM aims to be part of the solution to climate change,” said CSE Ph.D. student Ziyi (Francis) Yin. “With the recent innovations, we want to lower the risk of carbon storage projects.”

Another SLIM initiative involves a simulation-free seismic survey design using an annealing algorithm that provides accurate wavefield reconstruction with minimal seismic survey data.