Acoustic Monitoring of CO2/methane migration on coal seams

The main objective of this project is to investigate enhanced production of methane and the related permanent storage and migration of CO2 in the subsurface. The main tool is seismic tomography. At Delft University of Technology - Department of Geotechnology, traveltime and amplitude tomographic imaging techniques have been further improved to achieve high resolution (of the order of thickness of coal layers). Our aim is to validate this new theory on the real data set from the RECOPOL project ('Reduction of CO2 emission by means of CO2 storage in coal seams in the Silesian Coal Basin of Poland') or on a new ultrasonic measurements in a connection with it.

In this paper, we present results of a comparable experiment in the Alberta province of Canada where steam was injected in tar sand (heavy oil sand). Thereby, we confirm validity of our theory for time lapse tomography in a case of a physically very similar situation. Furthermore, we present preliminary experimental results of the ultrasonic measurements on a scaled model.