Improved seismic monitoring of CO2 sequestration with the weighted joint recovery model

Time-lapse seismic monitoring of CO2 sequestration is challenging because the time-lapse signature of CO2 plumes is weak in amplitude and often contaminated by imaging artifacts due to coarsely sampled, noisy, and non-replicated surveys. In this talk, we present a sparsity-promoting least-squares imaging method where the baseline, and the current and past monitor surveys are inverted jointly. We demonstrate that the sensitivity of seismic monitoring can be improved by inverting for the common component—i.e., the component shared by all vintages, and innovations with respect to this common component. Combining this joint approach with weighted l1,2-norm minimization leads to a monitoring scheme capable of detecting irregular CO2-plume growth in a realistic geological setting.