Monitoring lessons learned from O&G transfer to CCUS projects

In many underground injection control operations, injection allocations across the reservoir interval are not measured and thus are unknown. This is further complicated for a fluid like supercritical carbon dioxide (CO₂) because injectivity is expected to vary significantly over time due to reservoir dynamics like pressure cycling and salt precipitation. If anything, these dynamics place a higher priority on storage operators measuring CO₂ injectivity at the highest possible spatial resolution. This allows plume models to be optimally history-matched with time-lapse seismic imaging. The result is higher confidence in forecasting plume migration during and after injection operations. 

Over the past 15 years, the oil and gas industry has seen the rapid adoption of fiber optic sensing for downhole monitoring of distributed temperature and acoustic sensors along the entire wellbore for a wide variety of production and injection applications. Fiber optic cables installed behind casing or on tubing, along with injection and tubing pressure and temperature gauges, provide crucial downhole data about the reservoir dynamics. In unconventional wells, fluids and proppants were pumped in stages without any feedback about conformity or stimulated reservoir volume. This raised questions about where oil and gas production was really coming from. In recent years, fiber optic sensing has “turned on the lights” downhole. Its real-time analysis now advises on stimulation operations down to the perforation cluster interval, improving our understanding of where oil and gas are produced.

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