Processing and analysis of data recorded from a buried permanent seismic source

Tyler W. Spackman, Donald C. Lawton

The Containment and Monitoring Institute has established a Field Research Station in Newell County, Alberta for the purpose of testing various monitoring technologies in the context of carbon sequestration projects. This paper investigates the use of permanent seismic sources as a monitoring technique.

Installation and initial testing of permanent seismic sources at the Field Research Station was performed in September 2018. This study describes the differences between the permanent sources installed at the FRS, as well as the acquisition parameters used in the initial tests. We show the results of these initial tests, with a focus on the borehole source, and comment on some of the unique considerations for permanent source data. We also compare permanent source data to seismic data acquired with Vibroseis.

Raw, correlated permanent source data suffers from an extremely ringy character. We find that after applying Gabor deconvolution to the correlated data, the downgoing and upgoing wavefields are easily identifiable, and resultant images are comparable, if not superior to, those from a more conventional Vibroseis source.