Overview of active and passive seismic data acquisition and monitoring at the Illinois Basin – Decatur Project

The Illinois Basin – Decatur Project (IBDP) is an integrated carbon capture and geological storage project conducted at the Archer Daniels Midland Company’s (ADM) corn processing plant in Decatur, Illinois, USA (Figure 1). Nearly 1.1 million tons (1 million tonnes) of supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) was injected into the base of a 500 m thick saline sandstone reservoir at a depth of 2140 m over three years from 2011 to 2014. Prior to injection, an extensive investigation of site conditions included monitoring of air, soil, groundwater, and bedrock. Monitoring activities continued through the three-year injection period, and are ongoing during the post-injection period and scheduled to continue into the first quarter of 2020. As part of this site characterization and monitoring effort, an extensive and varied suite of seismic data has been collected. The seismic data includes three 2D seismic reflection lines across the site, several borehole vertical seismic profile (VSP) acquisitions, two different 3D seismic data volumes acquired four years apart, passive seismic monitoring from geophones installed in two different boreholes (and temporarily in a third), and passive seismic monitoring from an array of earthquake seismometers on the surface above the injection site.