4D Travel-Time Tomography as a Tool for Tracking Fluid-Driven Medium Changes in Offshore Oil–Gas Exploitation Areas

Abstract

The monitoring of rock volume where offshore exploitation activities take place is crucial to assess the corresponding seismic hazard. Fluid injection/extraction operations generate a pore fluid pressure perturbation into the volume hosting the reservoir which, in turn, may trigger new failures and induce changes in the elastic properties of rocks. Our purpose is to evaluate the feasibility of reconstructing pore pressure perturbation diffusion in the host medium by imaging the 4D velocity changes using active seismic. We simulated repeated active offshore surveys and imaged the target volume. We constructed the velocity model perturbed by the fluid injection using physical modeling and evaluated under which conditions the repeated surveys could image the velocity changes. We found that the induced pressure perturbation causes seismic velocity variations ranging between 2–5% and 15–20%, depending on the different injection conditions and medium properties. So, in most cases, time-lapse tomography is very efficient in tracking the perturbation. The noise level characterizing the recording station sites is a crucial parameter. Since we evaluated the feasibility of the proposed 4D imaging strategy under different realistic environmental and operational conditions, our results can be directly applied to set up and configure the acquisition layout of surveys aimed at retrieving fluid-induced medium changes in the hosting medium. Moreover, our results can be considered as a useful starting point to design the guidelines to monitor exploitation areas.