Continuous Land Seismic Reservoir Monitoring of Thermal EOR in the Netherlands

A continuous reservoir monitoring system has been installed for Shell, on a heavy-oil onshore field situated in the Netherlands, to re-develop oil production by Gravity-Assisted Steam Drive. The challenge was to continuously monitor using seismic reflection the expansion of the steam chest injected in the reservoir during production. The main problems for onshore time-lapse seismic are caused by near-surface variations between base and monitor surveys which affect the seismic signal coming from the reservoir. In our system, a set of permanent shallow buried sources and sensors has been installed below the weathering layer to both mitigate the near-surface variations and minimize the environmental footprint. The very high sensitivity of our buried acquisition system allows us to track very small variations of the reservoir physical properties in both the spatial and calendar domains. The 4D reservoir attributes obtained from seismic monitoring fit the measurements made at observation, production, and injector wells. A daily 4D movie of the reservoir property changes allows us to propose a scenario that explains the unexpected behavior of the production and confirms that the steam does not follow the expected path to the producer wells but rather a more complicated 3D path within the reservoir.