The draft European Directive for carbon capture and sequestration requires monitoring of potential leakage from CO2-storage sites. In this case, monitoring is a method of improving efficiency and will be mandatory for obtaining permission for such projects. Whereas monitoring the movement of the CO2 plume offshore can be achieved at reasonable costs, onshore monitoring leads to high costs and difficulties because of disturbance of residents if seismic is used. Several potential CO2-storage sites are onshore; therefore, monitoring methods that are low-cost and have a limited effect on the public are required. Conventional hydrocarbon production will benefit from this mandatory push for new technology.
One such method might be the use of microgravity, which recently was used successfully to monitor the movement of gas in an underground gas-storage project. By advancing this technology, its application envelope might expand even further into miscible- or immiscible-gas-injection enhanced-oil-recovery projects.
Another method used increasingly for monitoring is microseismic. Induced microearthquakes are considered the result of slippage or tensile deformation and can be detected at nearby seismic receivers. Even though the effects are not understood well, in tight gas formations, microseismics is used to monitor the direction and growth of induced fractures. The first featured paper shows the expansion of this technology into other hydrocarbon-production activities.
Less than a decade ago, the hydrocarbon-production industry discussed ways to cope with a world of low oil prices. This situation has changed dramatically. To optimize income from current high hydrocarbon prices, well-productivity loss from impairment must be minimized. The second featured paper describes a method of detecting such underperforming wells in real time.
Assuming that high hydrocarbon prices prevail, unconventional hydrocarbon resources, of which large quantities exist, come into focus. Today, hydrocarbons such as bitumen or shale gas, which for a long period of time were produced in relatively small quantities compared with conventional hydrocarbons, are high on the agenda of oil- and gas-producing companies. To date, methane hydrates are considered to be one of the most unconventional resources with large hydrocarbon volumes in place. The third paper discusses how these reservoirs could
be produced.
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