Comparison of seismic interferometry techniques for the retrieval of seismic body waves in CO2 sequestration monitoring

Abstract

Abstract Ambient noise seismic interferometry performed by cross-correlation has been proven to be a potential cost-effective technique for geological studies. To improve the resolution of images created by interferometry, additional techniques using deconvolution and cross-coherence have been introduced. While all three methods have previously been evaluated using surface wave data for shear-wave imaging of the near surface, comparatively little study has been devoted to assess the three methods for the retrieval of body waves in reflection surveys for time-lapse application. Moreover, although the application of seismic interferometry to CO2 sequestration by cross-correlation has been investigated by many researchers, to our knowledge, similar time-lapse studies have not been conducted using deconvolution and cross-coherence methods. We evaluate the three methods of cross-correlation, deconvolution and cross-coherence for the retrieval of phase information contained in virtual seismic records by applying seismic interferometry to synthetic data, using a model reservoir before and after CO2 injection. By examining two approaches of regularization and smoothing factors to suppress spurious reflection events observed on the deconvolution and cross-coherence results, we note that both approaches provide similar results. We investigate noise effects by adding random noise independently at each geophone. Finally, we apply these techniques to field data recorded near the CO2 storage site in Ketzin, Germany. For both our numerical and field data studies, we find that the cross-coherence technique retrieves the phase information of body-wave data more effectively than the cross-correlation and deconvolution techniques, and is less sensitive to uncorrelated noise from shallow sources.