Grant: Alliance Grants

We propose to collaborate with a petroleum industry partner to develop and test a novel approach to helping solve two problems: 1. monitoring efforts to mitigate climate change by capturing released carbon dioxide and storing it in the subsurface and 2. effectively monitoring oil and gas subsurface reserves to ensure none have been missed during production. The solution to both problems requires accurate monitoring of where fluids are and how they are moving in the subsurface. We propose to expand our current approaches that typically apply only a single monitoring technique at a time. Here we aim to combine two monitoring techniques: Seismic, which is good at localizing changes and Electromagnetic, which is good at determining what properties have changed and by how much. When we combine these techniques, we will do so using fast ways of simulating our data, so that we can see how well our modelled data match our recorded data. Once we have these fast simulation techniques, we can combine them with ways of sampling many models to allow us to not just estimate the changes, but also give a measure of the uncertainty of these changes. This aims to improve our ability to regulate these sorts of carbon sequestration techniques by giving a more detailed and nuanced picture of where the carbon is and how likely it is to remain there.