Evaluating geophysical monitoring strategies for a CO2 storage project

Geophysical monitoring of CO2 storage projects enables informed decision making of injection strategies. When monitoring projects are designed, decisions should be made related to which geophysical data should be collected, for example seismic or electromagnetic data, and when surveys should be collected. In this work, we conduct value of information analysis to assess when to perform monitoring and which data to collect. The assessment is based on multiple reservoir simulations and uncertainty quantification of the CO2 plume characteristics as well as for the most relevant data variables. We consider multiple time decision-making processes, which require probability updating after collecting data at previous time steps. To demonstrate the suggested workflow, we perform dynamic simulations of the CO2 saturation fluid flow model based on a simplified version of the Smeaheia reservoir characterization model. The results show that the value of information depends on the acquisition time and on the previously measured geophysical data. We compare results of the suggested monitoring workflow with traditional fixed-interval strategies to demonstrate that the proposed method achieves accurate decision making with more cost-effective monitoring.