Time-lapse seismic monitoring of geological carbon storage with the nonlinear joint recovery model

During time-lapse seismic monitoring of CO2 plumes, a weak 4D signal below the level of inversion or migration artifacts poses challenges. To address these, low-cost randomized non-replicated acquisitions and a linear joint recovery model (JRM) have been introduced. It takes advantage of the shared information between different vintages in the time-lapse seismic data and subsurface structure undergoing localized changes. Since the relationship between seismic data and subsurface properties is seldom linear, we propose a more versatile nonlinear JRM (nJRM) to invert for the squared slowness of the vintages. The nJRM takes advantage of the full nonlinear relation between these squared slownesses and time-lapse data through the wave equation. Also, careful derivation of the gradients makes the computational cost of nJRM equivalent to the independent recovery. We present a synthetic study for geological carbon storage (GCS) which shows that the non-replication can be beneficial to time-lapse imaging, making seismic monitoring of GCS less costly for the long term sustainability of the technology.