  Time-lapse seismic monitoring of carbon storage and sequestration is often
challenging because the time-lapse signature of the growth of CO2 plumes is
weak in amplitude and therefore difficult to detect seismically. This situation
is compounded by the fact that the surveys are often coarsely sampled and not
replicated to reduce costs. As a result, images obtained for different vintages
(baseline and monitor surveys) often contain artifacts that may be attributed
wrongly to time-lapse changes. To address these issues, we propose to invert
the baseline and monitor surveys jointly. By using the joint recovery model, we
exploit information shared between multiple time-lapse surveys. Contrary to
other time-lapse methods, our approach does not rely on replicating the surveys
to detect time-lapse changes. To illustrate this advantage, we present a
numerical sensitivity study where CO2 is injected in a realistic synthetic
model. This model is representative of the geology in the southeast of the
North Sea, an area currently considered for carbon sequestration. Our example
demonstrates that the joint recovery model improves the quality of time-lapse
images allowing us to monitor the CO2 plume seismically.
