Microseismic Monitoring in Carbon Capture and Storage Projects

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects have been developed during the last decades to address the issue of increasing level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. To track changes in the geomechanical properties of a CO2 reservoir, passive seismic monitoring systems are more and more deployed in CCS projects. Continuous recording of the induced microseismicity is particularly useful to estimate the behavior of the reservoir and to check the cap-rock integrity. In some cases, however, large location uncertainties can be associated with the recorded seismic events, primarily due to the seismic network geometry (e.g., deployment of only one string of geophones, only surface stations deployed with large inter-station distances,...). In this paper we give a brief overview of the CCS sites where microseismic monitoring is performed. We also present a pilot site at Longyearbyen, Svalbard where the seismic network is being upgraded to record data for testing classical and new seismological techniques.