Detecting Contaminants in Aquifers through Modeling of Surface-downhole Geoelectrical Data

BONGIOVANNI, MARÍA VICTORIA; GRUNHUT, VIVIAN; OSELLA, A.,

Torino

Conferencia; Near Surface Geoscience 2015; 2015

EAGE

Most of the world´s reservoirs are currently in the advanced primary or secondary recovery stage. Even though sinks wells used by oil companies are located much deeper than aquifers, they may eventually cause environmental damages contaminating the water with brine leakage, oil spill or other polluting agent. This is why it is extremely important to do vulnerability studies.Since contaminants have different electrical conductivity than water, geoelectrical methods can be useful to detect and even monitor flow evolution of the contamination plume. We want to see if it is possible to detect and monitor contaminations of an aquifer that lies above an oil reservoir, approximately at 300 m depth, with current injections on surface and voltages sensors in a well. In order to achieve this we have designed an electrical model of the reservoir including the contaminated aquifer with, either a conductive contamination such as saline brine or a resistive contamination such as oil spill, and numerically simulated the forward geoelectrical responses.