Background
An Australian E&P company, operating in the carbon storage space, needed to carry out a detailed 3D seismic survey prior to injection, as a baseline for future 4D monitoring of the CO2 plume. Specifically, the customer needed to assess how big the plume could be for an injection of 20Mt of CO2, and which area needed to be surveyed to capture the potential plume development.
Specific Challenges
Too small a surveyed area may not cover the plume in later stages, with no reference points for monitoring outside of the initial baseline survey, however, covering a large area would be very costly, given that the plume could stay within a significantly smaller area. While the company had performed some reservoir simulations to get some idea of plume size, but the results were not enough to provide them with decision-making confidence.
Solution
The Ariane advanced carbon storage module is able to provide tens of thousands of different, equally likely variations on their disparate base case scenarios, and, from this, produce an estimation of whether or not a plume will fit into a specific seismic survey area.
Outcome
Using the module to cover all the areas of potential uncertainty, the company felt confident in approving a baseline survey, saving weeks of work and potentially thousands of dollars to arrive at the same result without Ariane input. The module also enabled geoscientists and reservoir engineers to collaborate easily on the project.