Uncertainty-aware time-lapse monitoring of geological carbon storage with learned surrogates

Time-lapse seismic monitoring of CO2 sequestration is computationally expensive as it involves modeling of both fluid-flow physics and wave physics. It also requires differentiation through the solvers with respect to properties of interest in the subsurface. In this talk, we present a learned end-to-end inversion framework, which uses a pre-trained Fourier neural operator as a learned surrogate for the fluid-flow simulator in order to greatly reduces the cost associated with fluid-flow modeling and differentiation through the solver. Through synthetic experiments, we demonstrate the efficacy of this framework on inverting the subsurface permeability of the reservoir and on monitoring CO2 plumes. We further quantify the uncertainty of the permeability and CO2 plumes with conditional normalizing flow. With this framework, we can also forecast the growth of CO2 plumes in the future with uncertainty estimation without any acquired seismic data.