Unsupervised AI workflow to evaluate the transition of the 50-year giant Groningen gas field quickly and thoroughly to potential multiple CO2 storage and geothermal viable projects.

Abstract

Seismic data remain a pillar of subsurface modeling and the understanding of the potential for transitioning from oil and gas production to applications such as CO2 storage and geothermal projects. However, interpretation is a biased and time-consuming process forcing geoscientists to spend more energy picking horizons and building models than interpreting the significance of the results and their implications for ultimate field development, CO2 storage and geothermal project evaluation. In this paper, we detail the use of a new unsupervised Artificial Intelligence based on genetic algorithm to automatically process the seismic data in an unbiased way and record time. We applied this approach to the Groningen project (Figure 1), using data available online from the multiple seismic campaigns. After 3 minutes of processing by the artificial intelligence, we could display all horizons on the seismic and visualize attributes for all subsurface layers, only limited by the seismic signal penetration and build all necessary geological model to localize CO2 storage areas within the Zechstein salt and the Rotliegend reservoir and evaluate geothermal projects from multiple geothermal systems. The geothermal sources are in the same reservoirs/aquifers in which the oil and gas accumulations are hosted: Cenozoic, Upper Jurassic–Lower Cretaceous, Triassic and Rotliegend reservoirs. Additionally, the yet unproven hydrocarbon plays in the Lower Carboniferous (Dinantian) Limestones delivered geothermal heat in key geothermal systems. We successfully demonstrate the use of such AI on the Groningen case and pave the way for geoscientists to focus their attention on visualizing and interpreting the significance of the results generated by this global, fully automatic, and unbiased approach for applications such as CO2 storage and geothermal projects.