Full Waveform Inversion for Reservoir Monitoring - Pushing the Limits of Subsurface Resolution

Fluid movement in the subsurface and the associated changes in saturation translate into changes of the subsurface elastic parameters. Stress changes, whether due to fluid extraction/injection or deformation such as slips on preexisting faults, affect the elastic parameters as well. Detecting and inverting the imprint of changing subsurface elastic parameters on seismic data lies at the heart of time-lapse seismic imaging for reservoir monitoring. In this work we demonstrate that the recently proposed technique of simultaneous time-lapse full-waveform inversion with a model-difference regularization can be used to extract high-resolution information on magnitude and location of subsurface velocity and stress anomalies, potentially providing valuable input for reservoir monitoring and assessment of geohazards.