PhD thesis Andreas Schaller
On 9 February 2018 Andreas Schaller successfully defended his PhD work at the University of Delft on Land time-lapse CSEM. Collecting, modeling and inversion of CSEM data for a steam-injected oil field.
Geophysical methods are widely used for hydrocarbon exploration and time-lapse measurements. One method that can be applied in place of or in addition to the routinely used seismic method, is the Controlled-Source ElectroMagnetic (CSEM) method.
The work described in this thesis explores various aspects to improve the land CSEM method for exploration and monitoring purposes. Therefore, three separate active land CSEM field experiments, a baseline and two repeat surveys, were carried out over a period of nearly two years at the Dutch Schoonebeek oil field, where heavy oil is produced by injecting steam to reduce the viscosity of the oil. Steam injection and oil production have to be closely monitored to prevent breakthrough of steam to production wells and to detect possible unwanted leakage or contamination of groundwater such that further measures can be taken.