Seismic monitoring of CO2 plume dynamics using ensemble Kalman filtering

Monitoring carbon dioxide (CO2) injected and stored in subsurface reservoirs is critical for avoiding failure scenarios and enables real-time optimization of CO2 injection rates. Sequential Bayesian data assimilation (DA) is a statistical method for combining information over time from multiple sources to estimate a hidden state, such as the spread of the subsurface CO2 plume. An example of scalable and efficient sequential Bayesian DA is the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF). We improve upon existing DA literature in the seismic-CO2 monitoring domain by applying this scalable DA algorithm to a high-dimensional CO2 reservoir using two-phase flow dynamics and time-lapse full waveform seismic data with a realistic surface-seismic survey design. We show more accurate estimates of the CO2 saturation field using the EnKF compared to using either the seismic data or the fluid physics alone. Furthermore, we test a range of values for the EnKF hyperparameters and give guidance on their selection for seismic CO2 reservoir monitoring.