No Arabic abstract
Time-lapse seismic monitoring of carbon storage and sequestration is often challenging because the time-lapse signature of the growth of CO2 plumes is weak in amplitude and therefore difficult to detect seismically. This situation is compounded by the fact that the surveys are often coarsely sampled and not replicated to reduce costs. As a result, images obtained for different vintages (baseline and monitor surveys) often contain artifacts that may be attributed wrongly to time-lapse changes. To address these issues, we propose to invert the baseline and monitor surveys jointly. By using the joint recovery model, we exploit information shared between multiple time-lapse surveys. Contrary to other time-lapse methods, our approach does not rely on replicating the surveys to detect time-lapse changes. To illustrate this advantage, we present a numerical sensitivity study where CO2 is injected in a realistic synthetic model. This model is representative of the geology in the southeast of the North Sea, an area currently considered for carbon sequestration. Our example demonstrates that the joint recovery model improves the quality of time-lapse images allowing us to monitor the CO2 plume seismically.
Seismic data quality is vital to geophysical applications, so methods of data recovery, including denoising and interpolation, are common initial steps in the seismic data processing flow. We present a method to perform simultaneous interpolation and denoising, which is based on double-sparsity dictionary learning. This extends previous work that was for denoising only. The original double sparsity dictionary learning algorithm is modified to track the traces with missing data by defining a masking operator that is integrated into the sparse representation of the dictionary. A weighted low-rank approximation algorithm is adopted to handle the dictionary updating as a sparse recovery optimization problem constrained by the masking operator. Compared to traditional sparse transforms with fixed dictionaries that lack the ability to adapt to complex data structures, the double-sparsity dictionary learning method learns the signal adaptively from selected patches of the corrupted seismic data while preserving compact forward and inverse transform operators. Numerical experiments on synthetic seismic data indicate that this new method preserves more subtle features in the dataset without introducing pseudo-Gibbs artifacts when compared to other directional multiscale transform methods such as curvelets.
In this work, an inverse problem in the fractional diffusion equation with random source is considered. The measurements used are the statistical moments of the realizations of single point data $u(x_0,t,omega).$ We build the representation of the solution $u$ in integral sense, then prove that the unknowns can be bounded by the moments theoretically. For the numerical reconstruction, we establish an iterative algorithm with regularized Levenberg-Marquardt type and some numerical results generated from this algorithm are displayed. For the case of highly heterogeneous media, the Generalized Multiscale finite element method (GMsFEM) will be employed.
When carbon dioxide (CO2) is injected into an aquifer or a depleted geological reservoir, its dissolution into solution results in acidification of the pore waters. As a consequence, the pore waters become more reactive, which leads to enhanced dissolution-precipitation processes and a modification of the mechanical and hydrological properties of the rock. This effect is especially important for limestones given that the solubility and reactivity of carbonates is strongly dependent on pH and the partial pressure of CO2. The main mechanism that couples dissolution, precipitation and rock matrix deformation is commonly referred to as intergranular pressure solution creep (IPS) or pervasive pressure solution creep (PSC). This process involves dissolution at intergranular grain contacts subject to elevated stress, diffusion of dissolved material in an intergranular fluid, and precipitation in pore spaces subject to lower stress. This leads to an overall and pervasive reduction in porosity due to both grain indentation and precipitation in pore spaces. The percolation of CO2-rich fluids may influence on-going compaction due to pressure solution and can therefore potentially affect the reservoir and its long-term CO2 storage capacity. We aim at quantifying this effect by using a 2D numerical model to study the coupling between dissolution-precipitation processes, local mass transfer, and deformation of the rock over long time scales. We show that high partial pressures of dissolved CO2 (up to 30 MPa) significantly increase the rates of compaction by a factor of ~ 50 to ~ 75, and also result in a concomitant decrease in the viscosity of the rock matrix.
Geologic shear fractures such as faults and slip surfaces involve marked friction along the discontinuities as they are subjected to significant confining pressures. This friction plays a critical role in the growth of these shear fractures, as revealed by the fracture mechanics theory of Palmer and Rice decades ago. In this paper, we develop a novel phase-field model of shear fracture in pressure-sensitive geomaterials, honoring the role of friction in the fracture propagation mechanism. Building on a recently proposed phase-field method for frictional interfaces, we formulate a set of governing equations for different contact conditions (or lack thereof) in which frictional energy dissipation emerges in the crack driving force during slip. We then derive the degradation function and the threshold fracture energy of the phase-field model such that the stress-strain behavior is insensitive to the length parameter for phase-field regularization. This derivation procedure extends a methodology used in recent phase-field models of cohesive tensile fracture to shear fracture in frictional materials in which peak and residual strengths coexist and evolve by confining pressure. The resulting phase-field formulation is demonstrably consistent with the theory of Palmer and Rice. Numerical examples showcase that the proposed phase-field model is a physically sound and numerically efficient method for simulating shear fracture processes in geologic materials, such as faulting and slip surface growth.
We report on a novel stochastic analysis of seismic time series for the Earths vertical velocity, by using methods originally developed for complex hierarchical systems, and in particular for turbulent flows. Analysis of the fluctuations of the detrended increments of the series reveals a pronounced change of the shapes of the probability density functions (PDF) of the series increments. Before and close to an earthquake the shape of the PDF and the long-range correlation in the increments both manifest significant changes. For a moderate or large-size earthquake the typical time at which the PDF undergoes the transition from a Gaussian to a non-Gaussian is about 5-10 hours. Thus, the transition represents a new precursor for detecting such earthquakes.