Seismic dynamic monitoring in CO2 flooding based on characterization of frequency-dependent velocity factor

The phase velocity of seismic waves varies with the propagation frequency, and thus frequency-dependent phenomena appear when CO₂ gas is injected into a reservoir. By dynamically considering these phenomena with reservoir conditions it is thus feasible to extract the frequency-dependent velocity factor with the aim of monitoring changes in the reservoir both before and after CO₂ injection. In the paper, we derive a quantitative expression for the frequency-dependent factor based on the Robinson seismic convolution model. In addition, an inversion equation with a frequency-dependent velocity factor is constructed, and a procedure is implemented using the following four processing steps: decomposition of the spectrum by generalized S transform, wavelet extraction of cross-well seismic traces, spectrum equalization processing, and an extraction method for frequency-dependent velocity factor based on the damped least-square algorithm. An attenuation layered model is then established based on changes in the Q value of the viscoelastic medium, and spectra of migration profiles from forward modeling are obtained and analyzed. Frequency-dependent factors are extracted and compared, and the effectiveness of the method is then verified using a synthetic data. The frequency-dependent velocity factor is finally applied to target processing and oil displacement monitoring based on real seismic data obtained before and after CO₂ injection in the G89 well block within Shengli oilfield. Profiles and slices of the frequency-dependent factor determine its ability to indicate differences in CO₂ flooding, and the predicting results are highly consistent with those of practical investigations within the well block.