Time-lapse surface seismic processing for Stage 2C of CO2CRC Otway Project

Abstract

Stage 2C of the Otway project aims to detect a small injection of CO2-rich mixture into a saline aquifer, verify stabilisation of the injection and evaluate the detectability threshold of CO2 achievable by surface seismic. Over the past three years, we have produced five vintages of high-quality 4D seismic data showing the evolution of the 15,000 tonnes of injected scCO2/CH4 gas mixture into the saline aquifer at 1500 m depth. The time-lapse seismic processing workflow was built based on the findings from a synthetic feasibility study and processing of the baseline dataset. Through this workflow we processed the time-lapse data which allowed monitoring of small incremental injections (about 5 000 tonnes each). Here we elaborate on effect of various processing routines on the quality of 4D image, namely, amplitude restoration, prestack cross-equalization and imaging. We aim at preservation and restoration of time-lapse signal and suppression of time-lapse noise. We evaluate the results of the processing efforts in post-stack domain through estimates of 4D signal-to-noise ratio in vicinity of the injection interval. The usefulness of individual processing routines for improvement of time-lapse signal cannot be established independently from other routines in the same workflow. Surprisingly, images with pre-stack AGC applied have consistently higher time-lapse signal-to-noise ratio compared to images produced without it. Improvement of the resolution and appearance of 3D images does not guarantee increase of time-lapse signal-to-noise ratio.