From Image to Alarm: Focused Seismic as the Backbone of Low?Cost, High?Frequency CCS Monitoring

Low-cost monitoring is not low-value; it is a deliberate design choice that maximizes decision impact per unit of budget, footprint, and lead time. This paper presents a practical framework for geophysical surveillance in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), where monitoring must remain frequent, auditable, and sustainable over long project lifetimes. The framework is built around focused seismic monitoring, a targeted, non-imaging approach that reuses existing migrated seismic data to design repeatable measurements at selected subsurface locations. Rather than relying on routine field-wide re-imaging, focused seismic concentrates acquisition effort where information is most valuable for validating plume conformance and safeguarding containment. By replacing spatial redundancy with temporal repeatability at a limited number of optimized source–receiver pairs, the method enables fast deployment, light processing, and interpretation anchored in petro-elastic expectations.