Cost-Effective Time-Lapse Imaging of Carbon Capture and Sequestration Projects

McColpin, Glenn R.^1
1 Long Term Monitoring, Pinnacle Technologies, Houston, TX.

The reality of CCS is that any money spent on the process from the capture side to decades or more of monitoring will end up on the public's utility bill. In order for CCS to be accepted by the public, costs in any aspect of CCS need to be minimized. While capture costs exist during the lifetime of a powerplant, monitoring can extend for decades or more after a plant is decomissioned.

Surface Deformation Monitoring is a time lapse imaging method that may be able to efficiently image the CO2 plume and provide near real-time leakage detection. Some techniques like Interferrometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) have the ability to consistently image large areas with little or no ground instrumentation and at a significant savings over seismic based imaging methods.

In this poster we will describe surface deformation monitoring, show examples from some active monitoring projects and discuss how surface deformation data can be used to generate reservoir level information.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90090©2009 AAPG Annual Convention and Exhibition, Denver, Colorado, June 7-10, 2009