Exploration and monitoring of targets at drillable depths are becoming increasingly important to identify sustainable energy supplies (e.g., geothermal reservoirs), geo-resources (e.g. mineral, hydrocarbon, water) or underground storage sites (CO2, nuclear waste). Electrical conductivity is linked with constituents of rocks, such as fluids and mineralized networks. Hence, it is a key parameter to understand processes governing a wide range of geodynamic processes but also geothermal and hydrocarbon reservoirs, or mineral deposits or hydrological systems. In this talk, I will highlight how electromagnetic (EM) methods can be used to address these issues based on four years of controlled-source and natural EM measurements across a producing oil field in Lower Saxony, Germany. I will show recent and cheap developments of hardware and surveying strategies that enable to increase sensitivity to reservoirs located at more than 500 m depth with surface measurements, achievements in measurement repeatability, and as numerical developments that allow consideration of infrastructure such as steel-cased wells in 3D EM modelling. While EM methods have been applied for natural resources exploration for more than a century, monitoring of subsurface processes with continuous or time-lapse EM measurements has only recently attracted a wider interest, at least in practice. I will conclude this presentation with an outlook on potential targets for EM monitoring and discuss developments needed to detect and locate subsurface changes reliably.

Geowissenschaftliches Kolloquium "Perspectives of non-seismic applied near-surface geophysics"

in Geo 1550 und online:
https://uni-bremen.zoom.us/j/96524048625?pwd=VXAyWEVqNHo2Mzd3N1IrSVVrSVNIZz09

Weitere Informationen:

Dr. Kristina Tietze
e-Mail: kristina.tietze@gfz-potsdam.de
https://www.gfz-potsdam.de/staff/kristina-tietze/