PAULSSON
Advanced Optical Sensing

Allan Lee, PE, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), Chris Barclay, PG&E, David Xu, PG&E, Bjorn Paulsson, Paulsson Inc, Mike Wylie, Paulsson Inc, and Ruiqing He, Paulsson Inc. 

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This document was prepared for publication through American Society for Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and is intended for a gas industry reading audience. 

In 2021 Paulsson, Inc. (Paulsson) partnered with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and California Energy Commission (CEC) to research, develop, manufacture, deploy, and operate a robust, cost-effective, and all-optical Underground Gas Storage (UGS) reservoir surveying and monitoring system. Enhanced Distributed Acoustic Sensor (EDAS) and Distributed Temperature Sensor (DTS) data have been recorded, processed, and analyzed for more than 6 months. 

Adapted from oral presentation at Session: Seismic Reservoir Characterization, at AAPG Annual Convention and Exhibition, Houston, Texas, USA, April 10-13, 2011

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As part of a significant seismic technology effort, the BP Wamsutter Seismic Integration team conducted two extensive field trials during

2006 and 2007- a surface seismic field trial and a borehole seismic field trial.

Although 3D seismic imaging, based on surface sources and

receivers, has been the primary tool used for geophysical

reservoir monitoring to date, vertical seismic profiling (VSP)

has characteristics that make this technique particularly suitable

for time-lapse surveying.

Björn Paulsson, Martin Karrenbach, Paul Milligan, Alex Goertz, and Alan Hardin of Paulsson Geophysical Services, with John O’Brien and Don McGuire of Anadarko Petroleum Corporation explain why recording multi-component seismic data using receivers positioned deep in the earth, and closer to the target zone, can overcome many of the limitations experienced by surface 3D seismic methods.

Two crosswell seismic surveys were conducted at Chevron

Canada’s Oil Sand Lease 49 (Steepbank) located about 60 km

northeast of Fort McMurray, Alberta. This is the site of the

HASDrive commercial pilot project in which steam is circulated

through a horizontal well in order to preheat the tar sand

prior to conventional steam injection. The objective of the

crosswell survey was to define the geology and to monitor the

movement of the injected steam as part of the HASDrive

evaluation. The first survey was conducted 25 September-6

October 1991, just prior to steam injection. The second was

acquired 7-14 January 1992, after 72 days of continuous

steam injection.

Cross-well seismic tomography is developing into an important tool for reservoir management, and within the last few years there have been some notable advances in our understanding its imaging capability.

A cross-well seismic tomography survey was conducted jointly between Chevron and Texaco in the Texaco portion of the McKittrick oilfield. The McKittrick oil field is shallow, less than 1300 feet, and contains low gravity oil which is perched above the water table.  

Today it is common that 60 to 70 percent of the mobile oil is left in the ground when an oil reservoir is consid­ered economically depleted (DOE, 1986). The large percen­tage of mobile oil left in the ground is due, in part, to macroscopic inhomogeneities in the oil reservoirs.

The behavior of a quartz monzonite rock mass subjected

to a thermal load from emplaced canisters with

electric heaters simulating high-level nuclear waste was

monitored by a cross-hole seismic technique in a drift

340 m below the surface in the Stripa mine facility in

Sweden.

Tomographic imaging techniques were applied to two

crosshole data sets to determine the velocity structures

and the reliability and resolution of the algorithms on

real data. The experiments were carried out at the Retsoff

salt mine in New York and at the underground

radioactive waste study site at the Stripa mine facility in

Sweden.