MULTI-ATTRIBUTE 3D SEISMIC FAULT DETECTION AND ANALYSIS IN THE SAN JUAN BASIN

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a promising long-term and effective solution for removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. One ongoing example of CCS is the San Juan CarbonSAFE project, located in northwest New Mexico. The San Juan CarbonSAFE is a large-scale carbon sequestration project supported by the U.S. Department of Energy intending to securely store 50 million tons of CO2 in underground geologic formations in the San Juan Basin, over 30 years. To ensure the secure storage of CO2 in geological formations, it is important to identify faults and fractures that may be present in the confining zone. In this study, several fault-sensitive seismic attributes including the variance, coherency, curvature, and chaos are computed and utilized in delineating faults from 3D seismic data in the San Juan Basin. The quality of the seismic data is first improved using migration velocity analysis, pre-stack depth migration, and post-processing noise removal. Ant-tracking, capable of delineating continuous features, was employed in detecting, visualizing, and extracting 3D faults from the computed seismic attributes. The results demonstrate that there are no major faults in the planned confining and injection zones. The location, size, orientation, properties, and slip potential of the detected faults are analyzed and demonstrate that targeted injection can reduce the hazards associated with leakage and induced seismicity.