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Time-lapse seismic modeling and inversion of CO₂ saturation for storage and enhanced oil recovery

Fugro Seismic Imaging, Houston, USA

Corresponding author: MMeadows{at}fugro.com

It is widely recognized that carbon dioxide (CO₂) is an important agent in global warming, and much recent activity has focused on finding ways to reduce, eliminate, or sequester CO₂ in order to minimize its impact on the environment. In addition, miscible CO₂ floods have become increasingly important as an EOR (enhanced oil recovery) method for recovering residual or bypassed oil, and as an effective mechanism for long-term storage of CO₂. Clearly, an understanding of the effects of CO₂ on rock-fluid systems, together with an ability to accurately map CO₂ fronts during injection, are crucial for improving recovery rates, optimizing well patterns, locating bypassed oil and minimizing the cost of injected CO₂. This paper describes a new method to predict and quantify the effects of CO₂ injection in porous saline and oil/brine reservoirs using time-lapse seismic data. Unlike many inversion methods, this model-based approach is flexible enough to invert for multiple reservoir properties and their uncertainties using data that may include seismic tuning and other potentially complicating effects.