Quantitative seismic analysis of a thin layer of CO2 in the Sleipner injection plume

ABSTRACTTime-lapse seismic reflection data have proved to be the key monitoring tool at the Sleipner CO2 injection project. Thin layers of CO2 in the Sleipner injection plume show striking reflectivity on the time-lapse data, but the derivation of accurate layer properties, such as thickness and velocity, remains very challenging. This is because the rock physics properties are not well-constrained nor are CO2 distributions on a small scale. However, because the reflectivity is dominantly composed of interference wavelets from thin-layer tuning, the amplitude and frequency content of the wavelets can be diagnostic of their temporal thickness. A spectral decomposition algorithm based on the smoothed pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution has been developed. This enables single frequency slices to be extracted with sufficient frequency and temporal resolution to provide diagnostic spectral information on individual CO2 layers. The topmost layer of CO2 in the plume is particularly suitable for this type of analysi...

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