The presence of steel-cased wells and other infrastructure causes a significant change of the electromagnetic fields that has to be taken into consideration in modeling and interpretation of field data. A realistic and accurate simulation requires the borehole casing to be incorporated into the modeling scheme, which is numerically challenging. Due to the huge conductivity contrast between the casing and surrounding media, a spatial discretization that provides accurate results at different spatial scales ranging from millimeters to hundreds of meters is required. In this paper, we present a full 3D frequency-domain electromagnetic modeling based on a parallel finite-difference algorithm considering the casing effect and investigate its applicability on the borehole-to-surface configuration of the Hontomín CO2 storage site. To guarantee a robust solution of linear systems with highly ill-conditioned matrices caused by huge conductivity contrasts and multiple spatial scales in the model, we employ direct sparse solvers. Different scenarios are simulated in order to study the influence of the source position, conductivity model and the effect of the steel casing on the measured data. Several approximations of the real hollow casing that allow for large reduction in number of elements in the resulting meshes are studied. A good agreement between the modeled responses and the real field data demonstrates the feasibility of simulating casing effects in complex geological areas. The steel casing of the well greatly increases the amplitude of the surface electromagnetic fields and thus improves the signal-to-noise ratio and the sensitivity to deep targets.
A multichannel borehole‐to‐surface controlled‐source electromagnetic experiment was carried out at the onshore CO2 storage site of Hontomín (Spain). The electromagnetic source consisted of a vertical electric dipole located 1.5 km deep, and the electric field was measured at the surface. The subsurface response has been obtained by calculating the transfer function between the transmitted signal and the electric field at the receiver positions. The dataset has been processed using a fast processing methodology, appropriate to be applied on controlled‐source electromagnetics (CSEM) data with a large signal‐to‐noise ratio. The dataset has been analysed in terms of data quality and repeatability errors, showing data with low experimental errors and good repeatability. We evaluate if the induction of current along the casing of the injection well can reproduce the behaviour of the experimental data.
SUMMARYDuring the last years, different studies based on numerical simulations have shown the potential of CSEM for CO2 monitoring. In this study, we carried out a set of simulations for CSEM monitoring of CO2 realistic deep saline reservoir in a 3D dome anticline structure. We perform numerical simulations in different scenarios (emission frequencies and surface-to-borehole configurations) in order to investigate the effect on the resolution when the simulations are done considering a baseline geoelectric model resulting from the inversion of MT synthetic data.
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