Advances in Operational Surface Movement Monitoring with Spaceborne InSAR for Enhanced Oil Recovery
Henschel, Michael; Deschamps, Benjamin; Branson, Wendy
MDA Geospatial Services Inc., CANADA

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) is a proven technology for monitoring surface movement over an oil field. The technology has been shown to provide robust estimates of surface heave and subsidence in a large number of environments and can be used reliably to calibrate coupled geomechnical and reservoir models to increase the performance of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations.

The increasing number of SAR sensors now available means that higher repeat coverage and independent measurements of motion can be achieved. The multiple beam modes of RADARSAT-2 and/or the multiple satellites of Cosmo-SkyMed or TerraSAR-X can be fused together to provide high repeat, independent measurements of the ground. The upcoming Sentinel-1 launch will only increase the robustness of the multi-track InSAR method described here.

This paper will present a model of the effects of monitoring an Enhanced Oil Recovery field with multiple tracks from various satellites. The model helps to establish the best practice monitoring programme for the recovery operation in use. The modelling presented will be validated by a demonstration of the long term monitoring of a steam-drive recovery site in Southern California. This analysis uses both RADARSAT-1 and RADARSAT-2 multi-tracks and multi-incidence angles to create a long time series analysis of deformation using C-band data