Emerging seismic monitoring techniques to understand microseismicity at a shallow CO2 injection site

Carbon Capture and Storage is projected to play a key role in achieving the federal government’s target of reducing Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050. CMC Research Institutes, in partnership with the University of Calgary, has established the Containment and Monitoring Institute Field Research Station (FRS), a state-of-the-art testbed facility to develop, test and validate monitoring technologies, and to accelerate innovation and commercialization of geological carbon storage domestically and internationally. An onset of microseismic activity, consisting of thousands of events located in the shallow sedimentary layers above the target reservoir at a depth of approximately 300 m, was first observed in 2020. The proposed research will explore the use of emerging technologies, such as Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) and machine learning, to improve seismic monitoring capabilities and accuracy of discrimination of anthropogenic events. These microseismic observations will be combined with other seismic observations, including shallow surface wave dispersion and controlled-source VSP measurements, and the resultant data will be inverted in a Bayesian nonlinear probabilistic framework for microseismic event relocations and 3D anisotropic velocity structure with robust uncertainties.

Faculty Supervisor:

Hersh Gilbert

Student:

Partner:

CMC Research Institutes Inc

Discipline:

Earth science

Sector:

Administrative and support, waste management and remediation services; Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Calgary

Program: