Between a Rock and a Bright Place: 4D Imaging of Basalt under Deformation
Icelandic basalt has gained considerable prominence as a geological storage medium following successful CO2 sequestration trials via carbonation at the CarbFix project in 2012. Fluid injection, CO2 storage, overburden loading, and regional tectonic forces alter the in-situ stress state of the reservoir, potentially inducing deformation that modifies pore architecture, and fluid migration pathways. Understanding deformation-induced changes in the petrophysical properties of Icelandic basalt is critical in assessing the performance and storage security of basaltic reservoirs.
My talk will be split into three parts:
- Method: Imaging the basalt during deformation using synchrotron x-ray microtomography and triaxial deformation rig, Kore. The imaging of each sample provides up to 2TB of x-ray images for further processing, including pore network modelling, permeability simulations, and digital volume correlation.
- Poro-Perm Evolution: Deformation of dry vs. wet basalt cores. Evolution of porosity and permeability with respect to deformation is analysed and presented to better understand the impact of fluid, if any.
- Digital Volume Correlation: Using DVC to better understand the changes in volumetric and von Mises shear strain throughout deformation.
Short Bio: Syadhisy Dhanapal began his foray into geophysics, at the University of Washington in Seattle. After graduation, he worked for PETRONAS, which is the national oil and gas company of Malaysia for eight years, alternating between seismic acquisition and processing, covering both on-land and marine data. He later pivoted into Computer Science at the University of York to better understand the hype surrounding deep learning techniques in image processing. Currently, he is a Doctoral Research Fellow with Njord & CompSci, studying the deformation of basalt and investigating out-of-distribution generalization for machine learning techniques including convolutional neural network and transformer architectures.
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