Detecting gas leakage using high-frequency signals generated by air-gun arrays

Abstract

Recent field experiments have demonstrated that marine air-gun arrays create acoustic energy greater than 1 kHz. We have suggested to use the high-frequency signal as a source to look for gas leakage at, for instance, a producing hydrocarbon field, or a [Formula: see text] storage site in which the field is covered by permanent acoustic sensors at the seabed, often referred to as a permanent reservoir monitoring field. The only needed modification is that the temporal sampling interval for the receivers is decreased to 0.1 ms (in contrast to the normal sampling interval of 1 or 2 ms), to ensure that the system is capable of recording signals up to 5 kHz. We suggest using numerous fixed receivers at the seabed to detect a gas chimney by simple high-pass filtering and subsequent transmission type analysis of the recorded signals. We think this method might serve as an elegant, precise, and very cost-effective way to detect gas leakage into the water layer.