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Each year, MIT Earth Resources Laboratory invites representatives of our Founding Member companies to MIT to hear about our latest research and meet our students and postdocs. This year’s meeting will take place via Zoom, and the theme will be “Perspectives for geophysics in industry: Deep nets for inverse problems and questions in carbon injection.” In addition to technical talks, we’ll be offering additional Zoom rooms for informal discussion. Invitations have been sent to our Founding Members, project sponsors, and alumni. If you didn’t receive your invitation, please contact erl-info@mit.edu.
All times are US Eastern Daylight Time (UTC -4
| Day | Start | End | Session | Speaker | Title | Summary |
| Wednesday, May 20 | 10:00 | 10:15 | Welcome | Laurent Demanet | ||
| 10:15 | 10:45 | Plenary Session I | John Williams | A Data 1st Case Study – Learning from Production Data | ||
| 10:45 | 11:00 | Break | ||||
| 11:00 | 11:20 | Uncertainty Quantification & Geothermal | Stephen Brown | Machine learning for natural resource assessment: an application to the blind geothermal systems of Nevada | Regional scale maps of geological and geophysical parameters are being used in machine learning algorithms to estimate the geothermal energy potential of the Great Basin of the western United States. | |
| 11:20 | 11:40 | Chen Gu | Bayesian model selection and the application to geothermal development | I developed a bayesian model selection method to compare multiple geothermal predictive models on the same scale, and select the best model to do robust geothermal prediction with uncertainty quantification. | ||
| 11:40 | 12:00 | Andrea Scarinci | Assessing inference quality under model misspecification: an application to seismic inversion | We proposed a new misfit measure for robust inference under model misspecification. How can we quantitatively verify the improvement? And in what terms? | ||
| 12:00 | 12:15 | Break | ||||
| 12:15 | 12:30 | Student and Postdoc Introductions | Samiya Alkhairy, Hilary Chang, Aarti Dwivedi, Sarah Greer, Jing Jian, Magreth Kakoko, Brindha Kanniah, Paris Smalls, Anuar Togaibekov, Mohamad Zaarour, Chenguang Zhang | ERL students and postdoctoral researchers introduce their work. | ||
| 12:30 | 13:45 | Break | ||||
| 13:45 | 14:05 | CO2 Storage & Induced Seismicity | Maryam Alghannam | Understanding rate effects in induced seismicity | We developed a new spring-slider model of earthquake nucleation that reflects pressurization rate effects on induced earthquakes. | |
| 14:05 | 14:25 | Josimar Alves da Silva | Modeling CO2 Storage in a Gulf of Mexico Reservoir Using Coupled Flow and Geomechanics | We investigate the impact of large scale CO2 storage on the stability of faults in the Gulf of Mexico using a coupled flow and geomechanics model. Our model is grounded on a realistic geological model typical of the Gulf of Mexico area. We show that large-scale CO2 injection can be performed safely but care must be taken regarding the well locations and the injection schedule. | ||
| 14:25 | 14:45 | Tiange Xing | Time-dependent Deformation in Basalt | We constrained the effect of water on time-dependent brittle creep deformation in basaltic rocks from the CarbFix site in Iceland. These experiments form a base line for future carbonation experiments on the basalts. Our study will fill the current gaps in understanding of long-term deformation behavior and transport properties of basaltic rocks at reservoir conditions and provide guidance to future applications of geological CO2 mineralization storage. | ||
| 14:45 | 15:00 | Break | ||||
| 15:00 | 15:20 | Deep Learning & Seismic Inversion | Hongyu Sun | Elastic full waveform inversion with extrapolated low frequency data | By leveraging deep learning technologies, we extend our work on extrapolated FWI (EFWI) by proposing to synthesize the low frequencies of multi-component elastic seismic records, and use those “artificial” low frequencies to seed the frequency sweep of elastic FWI. | |
| 15:20 | 15:40 | Pawan Bharadwaj | SymAE: an autoencoder with embedded physical symmetries for passive time-lapse monitoring | SymAE is a network trained to accurately monitor the subsurface changes irrespective of the variability in the passive sources. | ||
| 15:40 | 16:00 | Matthew T.C. Li | Wide-band Butterfly Network: An architecture for multifrequency sub-wavelength imaging | We incorporate the physics of wave propagation into our neural network architecture in order to super-resolve scatterers with length scales below the diffraction limit. | ||
| 16:00 | 16:15 | Break | ||||
| 16:15 | 16:35 | Next-Generation Computational Methods | Adrien Scheuer | The method of polarized traces for the 3D Helmholtz equation | We have developed a fast, accurate and scalable solver for the high-frequency 3D Helmholtz equation in heterogeneous acoustic media. The solver is based on the method of polarized traces and is coupled with distributed linear algebra libraries and pipelining of the many sources to achieve a sublinear online runtime with respect to the total number of unknowns. | |
| 16:35 | 16:55 | Zhilong Fang | Lift and Relax for waveform inversion | We developed a Lift and Relax method for full waveform inversion to mitigate the local minima issue. | ||
| 16:55 | 17:15 | Matteo Couplet | Porous media reconstruction using Deep Texture Synthesis | Using deep learning, we have successfully reconstructed 3D porous media models from 2D images while preserving the macroscopic physical properties. | ||
| Wed. 05/20 Informal Discussion Rooms | 12:00 | 14:00 | 1. Uncertainty Quantification & Geothermal | Hosted by Andrea Scarinci | ||
| 14:00 | 15:00 | 4. Next-Generation Computational Methods | Hosted by Matthew T.C. Li | |||
| 14:45 | 16:00 | 2. CO2 Storage & Induced Seismicity | Hosted by Josimar Alves da Silva | |||
| 14:45 | 17:45 | 5. Fractures | Hosted by Hao Kang | |||
| 17:15 | 18:15 | 4. Next-Generation Computational Methods | Hosted by Adrien Scheuer | |||
| 18:15 | 19:15 | Hosted by Zhilong Fang | ||||
| Thursday, May 21 | 10:00 | 10:15 | Welcome | Laurent Demanet | ||
| 10:15 | 10:45 | Plenary Session II | Shuhei Ono | Generation temperature of methane estimated from doubly substituted isotopologue (13CH3D) | ||
| 10:45 | 11:00 | Break | ||||
| 11:00 | 11:20 | Fractures | Ekaterina Bolotskaya | Earthquake Rupture Modeling: Fracturing vs. Friction | We qualitatively and quantitatively compared the fault parameters for different rupture propagation approaches (rate-and-state friction, slip weakening friction, exponential cohesive zone fracturing model) by means of FEM simulations. Results produced by different approaches are virtually indistinguishable (apart from very near-field stress profile observations) given the fracture energy is set the same in all cases. | |
| 11:20 | 11:40 | Yue Olivia Meng | Jamming transition and emergence of fracturing in wet granular media | We developed a hydromechanical model to study the impact of wettability on hydraulic fracturing patterns, and the proposed jamming phase diagram provides insights on the interplay between solid and fluid mechanics, which has wide applications in enhanced oil recovery | ||
| 11:40 | 12:00 | Ignacio Arzuaga García | Interaction of hydraulically induced fractures with natural fractures in shale | We introduce a combined AE-Imaging(Visual)-DIC data analysis process through which we generated Qualitative and Quantitative correlations between governing parameters of interaction between natural and hydraulic fractures in shale, particularly focused on addressing Vaca Muerta’s formation strike-slip stress regime effect on wells productivity. | ||
| 12:00 | 12:20 | Rafael Villamor Lora & Hao Kang | Fracture deformation and its effects on flow – experiments and simulations | We have developed a novel experimental setup to investigate the interplay between flow and fracture stiffness in stressed fractures. In addition, we have successfully used ABAQUS to simulate micro-indentation and the mechanical compression of multiple fracture surface asperities. | ||
| 12:20 | 12:40 | Ammar Alali | Hybrid Data Driven Drilling and Rate of Penetration Optimization | We have built a data-driven scheme to optimize the drilling rate of penetration by utilizing historical and real-time data, which can work in any development field.” | ||
| 12:40 | 14:00 | Break | ||||
| 14:00 | 15:00 | Business Meeting | For representatives of ERL Founding Member companies and ERL faculty. | |||
| Thu. 05/21 Informal Disucssion Rooms | 12:00 | 14:00 | 2. CO2 Storage & Induced Seismicity | Hosted by Saleh Al-Nasser | ||
| 12:00 | 14:00 | 3. Deep Learning & Seismic Inversion | Hosted by Hongyu Sun | |||
| 12:40 | 13:40 | 1. Uncertainty Quantification | Hosted by F. Dale Morgan | |||
Image: Christine Daniloff, MIT