Acoustic fibre optics - a pathway to improved recovery?

摘要

OptaSense, a UK company specialising in Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) using fibre optics, is developing its technology in a number of oil and gas applications, including security, hydraulic fracture profiling, production monitoring and vertical seismic profile (VSP) recording. All of these applications are exciting, but perhaps it is the VSP recording which is most exciting, if it enables production and recovery to be improved in ways that hasn't been done before - and carbon dioxide to be safely stored in reservoirs. The technology was developed with Shell and was subject to an exclusivity agreement from 2011 for 2013 for use in oilwells - but is now available to the whole industry. The technology makes use of the fact that laser light passing through a fibre-optic cable is affected by the sounds (acoustics) around the cable. With clever signal processing, you can work out what sounds each part of the cable could hear, as though there were microphones installed along the cable.