Imaging and monitoring the Reykjanes supercritical geothermal reservoir in Iceland with time-lapse CSEM and MT measurements

TL;DR

This study evaluates the effectiveness of time-lapse CSEM and MT measurements for monitoring a supercritical geothermal reservoir in Iceland, highlighting the challenges and potential of electromagnetic methods in noisy industrial environments.

Contribution

It demonstrates the high repeatability of CSEM surveys, assesses the limitations of MT in noisy settings, and shows the necessity of joint inversion for imaging supercritical reservoir zones.

Findings

CSEM survey repeatability within a few percent

Good resistivity model match up to 2-3 km depth

No detectable CSEM signal related to thermal stimulation

Abstract

We have investigated the benefits and drawbacks of active EM surveying (Controlled-Source EM or CSEM) for monitoring geothermal reservoirs in the presence of strong industrial noise with an actual time-lapse survey over the Reykjanes geothermal field in Iceland before and after the thermal stimulation of the supercritical RN-15/IDDP-2 geothermal well. It showed that a high CSEM survey repeatability can be achieved with electric field measurements (within a few percent) but that time-lapse MT survey is a challenging task because of the high level of cultural noise in this industrialized environment. To assess the quality of our CSEM dataset, we inverted the data and confronted the resulting resistivity model with the resistivity logged in the RN-15/IDDP-2 well. We obtained a good match up to 2-3km depth, i.e. enough to image the caprock and the liquid-dominated reservoir but not deep enough to image the reservoir in supercritical conditions. To obtain such an image, we had to jointly invert legacy MT data with our CSEM data. On the monitoring aspects, the analysis of changes in electric fields did not allow to identify any CSEM signal related to the thermal stimulation of the RN-15/IDDP-2 well. One possible explanation is the weakness of the time-lapse CSEM signal compared the achieved CSEM survey repeatability as a result of a limited resistivity change over a limited volume within the reservoir.