Talking and Listening to Reservoirs: Production Monitoring by Active and Passive Seismic

Time-lapse seismic technology matured in the current decade, achieving major successes in offshore fields. On land, repeatability and noise remain hard issues, when production changes only marginally the seismic response of the reservoir. This is the challenge of onshore carbonate fields, for example, which are a large share of hydrocarbon reserves worldwide. The integration of active and passive seismic data, acquired both at surface and in boreholes, provides us information about local stress changes due to injection– not only for hydrocarbon production, but also for gas storage and CO2 sequestration. In conjunction with well core analysis, this information paves the way for a further level of integration in reservoir simulation, i.e., including geomechanics, whose relevance is proven by subsidence and uplift effects at several producing fields.