306: How Geophysics Builds Trust in CO2 Storage

I think it's really telling us we're still in sort of the divergent thinking stage We have a number of different tools that we're bringing over from oil and gas and other areas of applied geophysics.

And we have a handful of great field examples, but we don't yet have a large number of field examples.

So everyone is still trying to perfect the optimal geophysical toolkit for this particular task, I think.

We can add to that.

I think what our special section here showed was that we have a lot of non-seismic methods that are coming into play, but we really would need much more sharing of data.

and sharing of mistakes and course corrections.

That wouldn't improve operations and operations security.

And I think some sort of an independent body might be useful that can share those data without attributing blame.

I think that's the biggest thing that prevents companies from sharing what the lessons learned were.

That's a very interesting idea about an independent body.

I could see SEG possibly playing a role in something like that in the future.

One of the major themes that I saw in the special section is about balancing resolution, coverage, and cost.

Where is the field making real progress on that trade-off and what still needs to improve before these approaches can really scale?

So, you know, I think there's really two main areas and, One is optimizing our approach to seismic surveillance, namely, what is the most appropriate seismic geometry to use? There's 3D full surface coverage, there's 2D lines, vertical seismic profiles, even discussions about doing simple 1D point-to-point measurements.

And second, like Manika was talking a little bit before there, what are the non-seismic methods that could displace some of the seismic methods that we're using for cost-effective fit-for-risk surveillance? Both of these are seeing near-term testing, and there are papers on them in this special section and in other forums.

Developments are going on for both, but we really need additional empirical examples to really scale these more non-traditional methods to really be appropriate for use in these full CCS projects.

I think, Mike, you're very right, because we've introduced the methods.

The teams have sort of displayed what all they can do.

We have little calibration data and little modeling that incorporates multi-physics approaches, which are being displayed, the non-seismic methods alongside seismic methods.

And yet our models just work with one type of data or the other type.

So we need to get that part improved before we can apply these things like scale.