A technology adoption journey: Ten years of bringing focused seismic monitoring from oil and gas to CCS

Introduction

‘If it worked as simply as that, we’d have been doing it for years already.’ That is what Habib Al Khatib, SpotLight’s co-founder, was told the first time he pitched a sparse, focused seismic monitoring method to his former employer. The scepticism was not about the physics, which is straightforward yet tricky when it comes to locating and operating such a small number of sources and receivers, but whether a method this inexpensive could be trusted at all. Ten years and more than thirty projects later, the same method is independently cited, tested and, in places, extended by operators, competitors and academic groups.

SpotLight’s trajectory offers a comprehensive case of technology adoption in the energy transition. Looking back across ten years of successes and failures, this paper retraces the key moments and stages of that adoption, in a structure believed to generalise to other subsurface monitoring technologies moving into CCS.

The technology: focused, sparse-acquisition seismic monitoring

Before turning to the adoption journey, it is worth being precise about what is being adopted. Conventional time-lapse (4D) seismic monitoring repeats a full 3D survey at regular intervals, trading spatial coverage for cost and long turnaround, typically months to years. SpotLight’s method instead uses one optimal source and receiver location, at the surface or seabed, per spot. Locations are chosen through a predictive workflow combining flow model output and forward modelling – to identify where the largest 4D response is expected – with migrated seismic data quality, to maximise signal-to-noise ratio there (Morgan et al., 2020; Al Khatib et al., 2021).

Because each spot reuses a fixed, repeatable source and receiver geometry, mispositioning noise – the dominant error source limiting conventional time-lapse sensitivity – is reduced enough that a spot can be re-surveyed at a fraction of the cost and turnaround of a full 4D survey, supporting calibration during injection or monthly/yearly monitoring rather than the multi-year intervals typical of conventional 4D campaigns (Acuña et al., 2024). The trade-off is coverage: a spot samples one location, not a volume, so placement is as much a modelling problem as an acquisition one.

That trade-off is the objection most often raised against sparse acquisition: how can a method that samples points give assurance about the volume in between? The answer is that coverage is carried by the model, not the acquisition. Spots are positioned where the dynamic model predicts the largest 4D response; each monitor then confirms the model or forces its revision – a spot tests a prediction rather than sampling the plume, a framing developed independently by Hu, Liu and Mukerji (2026) at Stanford. Where a spot cannot carry that burden alone, it is combined with the rest of the monitoring toolbox: pressure and temperature, well integrity logging, and, where warranted, conventional 3D or 4D acquisition.

Why the energy transition changes the game

The broader shift geoscientists face across the energy transition has been discussed elsewhere (Morgan and Cosson, 2025); the focus here is narrower: what specifically changes for a monitoring technology moving from oil and gas into CCS. Nolan et al. (2026), from ExxonMobil, document this directly: geophysics technologies already proven in production settings still face high barriers before they are trusted for CO2 monitoring, since the CCS project base able to fund technology maturation remains small compared with decades of oil and gas activity.

Cost structures compound the difficulty: CCS projects carry monitoring purely as a cost, justified for thirty to sixty years without a barrel of oil to offset it, and safety, public trust and regulatory sign-off weigh more heavily on CCS surveillance than in enhanced-oil-recovery settings.

Hovorka et al. (2026) describe the resulting shift as a move from research pilots to commercial deployment: a change of audience, since technologies now need to satisfy regulators, insurers and the public, not only reservoir engineers or geophysicists, and the economics are judged against real return on investment.

Checking a new technology’s fit with the applicable regulatory framework is therefore as important as its technical performance. ISO 27914:2026, governing the geological storage of CO2, requires operators to design a monitoring and verification (M&V) plan that is risk-based and structured around three phases: pre-injection baseline characterisation, injection-phase calibration of predictive models, and post-injection surveillance demonstrating containment at closure (ISO 27914:2026, Clause 9). A technology that cannot be justified against a specific phase and risk scenario, with evidence a regulator can review, does not clear this bar, however well it performs technically.

There is also a physical bar, independent of cost or regulation. CO2 replacing brine or gas in the pore space changes acoustic impedance only modestly at typical CCS saturations, and the detection threshold is strongly lithology-dependent: SpotLight’s own project database shows average saturation thresholds of 6-7% in sandstone and 14% in carbonates (Figure 1) – a property of the reservoir, not the acquisition, established site by site rather than assumed from a class average, consistent with evidence that carbonates show a more subtle 4D response than clastics (Barker et al., 2008). Furre et al. (2025) reach a related conclusion: even conventional 4D seismic loses sensitivity when geometry or reservoir properties are non-optimal, so detectability, not only cost, is a real ceiling. It is against this backdrop – cost, regulation, physical detectability – that SpotLight’s adoption journey needs to be read.

In practice, regulatory acceptance rests on three pillars: a genuine field implementation, a benchmark against the established method regulators already trust, and a peer-reviewed publication record open to scrutiny outside the company producing it. Greensand supplied the first, discussed below; the multi-year comparison at Weyburn supplied the second; and only in 2026, six years into deployment, did peer-reviewed literature – as distinct from conference proceedings – begin appearing, with two papers in The Leading Edge (Morgan and Al Khatib, 2026; Morgan et al., 2026b). None of the three substitutes for the others.

The SpotLight case study: ten years of journey

Figure 2 summarises this ten-year journey by stage.

SpotLight was founded in 2016, recognised that year with Evolen’s Energy Prize. Its first contract, in 2017, was a feasibility study for another energy company; work with OMV began in 2018 and became the technology’s first field implementation, documented two years later in the founding paper below. Like most subsurface innovations, it began inside oil and gas, not on a CCS site.

Validation: proving the concept outside CCS

The founding paper (Morgan et al., 2020) documented the first deployment: a single source-receiver pair per spot monitoring a Miocene sandstone gas storage reservoir onshore Austria. Over the following two years, the principle was successfully tested on a McMurray Formation oil sand reservoir under SAGD in Alberta (Brun et al., 2021), and a fractured Miocene carbonate reservoir under thermal gravity drainage in desert Oman (Boubaker et al., 2022) – different rock types and operators, each a further validation before the method ever monitored a CO2 molecule.

Field proof: two milestones under real CCS conditions

The pivot to CCS produced the milestone considered most consequential to date. Greensand, offshore Denmark, was the first offshore implementation of the full operational model (Roth et al., 2023), described at the time by Ollivier et al. (2023) as a breakthrough in seismic acquisition. The achievement lay in the successful CO2 detection, but also in proving the model could be deployed offshore at all: rather than the dedicated seismic vessel many assumed such a survey would require, the acquisition used a maintenance vessel already stationed on the field, a compact 600 cubic-inch source and a small receiver spread, deployed in under a day with source positions held statically within a two-metre radius via the vessel’s existing dynamic positioning system (Figure 3). Avoiding boat mobilisation made most of the difference, possible because the acquisition itself takes just 1 to 3 days.

That combination was refined further, with incremental improvements, on a depleted field offshore UK, using repeated static-source acquisitions completed in hours rather than days (Cosson et al., 2025). There, Mikhael et al. (2026) linked the measured time-shift (ΔTS) at each spot to a forward-modelled pressure field, demonstrating for the first time that a pressure front, not just a saturation change, could be tracked during active injection – precisely the evidence ISO 27914:2026 asks operators to produce during that phase.

At Weyburn, Canada, four years of repeated spot seismic monitoring were compared, spot by spot, against a conventional 4D seismic survey acquired independently by the field operator, using nRMS-based amplitude and time-shift analysis at each of the sixteen monitored locations (Peruch, Chen and Morgan, 2025). The sequence matters as much as the comparison: a baseline and three annual monitors were acquired, and reported in three publications, before the operator’s 4D survey – so the 4D result arrived as an independent test of predictions already on record, not a reference those predictions could be adjusted against. Spots within the operator’s mapped CO2 sweep zone showed clear, repeatable time-shift anomalies consistent with the 4D result, while those outside showed none: a clear match, not a subtle statistical trend, which is what gave the operator confidence in the method.

A counter-example: when detection failed

Not every deployment succeeded, and the exception is worth describing rather than folding quietly into the successes above. In 2022, at a desertic carbonate oil reservoir in Oman, a repeatability test during baseline acquisition was genuinely encouraging: day-to-day comparison showed a detectability threshold below 300 microseconds in time-shift and below 5% in amplitude (Messamah et al., 2024) – comfortably within range for the expected steam-front signal.

The actual monitor survey, acquired a few months later, told a different story. Over that interval the near-surface ground-roll wavefield had changed enough that it was no longer comparable to the baseline – reflection and ground-roll velocities were unusually close here, a field-dependent condition tied to near-surface velocity structure and soil type. Despite a robust acquisition design (sub-metre repositioning, good coupling, an antenna sized against legacy 3D data at 1 m spacing over 100 m) the resulting time-shift was unstable and the reservoir signal could not be separated from noise. The steam-front conformance the operator needed to see was not detected.

The diagnosis came from testing a longer-offset antenna reaching 1.2 km: a window far enough from the ground-roll cone retained a high correlation coefficient, showing the signal was sound and the failure was one of survey design, not of the method itself. That corrected design was never deployed on this field, however: it was too shallow to leave room for an offset window wide enough to separate reflection from ground roll. Such a longer-offset design is nonetheless favourable for CCS specifically, since most CO2 storage targets sit deep enough (800 m–2 km) to spare the window this shallow EOR reservoir could not.

The distinction – filtering ground roll after the fact versus out-designing it with a longer offset – is now central to how SpotLight plans focused seismic elsewhere: a longer-offset antenna is now a standard part of survey design, made possible because near-surface velocity contrasts are already known from the preliminary seismic data routinely available on a field.

Client buy-in: an expanding and diversifying client base

Field proof convinced operators one field at a time; what followed was a broader base of clients spanning offshore Norway, onshore USA, offshore UK, onshore desert UAE, onshore Denmark, and onshore Texas – sandstone and carbonate, deep and ultra-deep, saline and depleted. No two fields in CCS present the same challenge, and that growing, diverse client base is itself evidence of adoption, each project making spot seismic a little more robust, reliable and agile.

Thirty-one projects across eleven countries in ten years, eleven of them in 2026 alone, as shown in Figure 4. The acceleration visible in 2026 reflects not only SpotLight’s own growth but a broader market shift: as sparse, focused seismic approaches gain wider acceptance across the industry (Figure 6), clients increasingly arrive already persuaded of the underlying paradigm, not only of this particular implementation of it.

A parallel track: partnerships and academia

Two collaborations sit outside this four-stage sequence because they are partnerships rather than adoption by an operator. Carbon Management Canada’s CaMI research facility gave SpotLight its first opportunity to test the method on borehole VSP data rather than surface seismic (Abrouche et al., 2024). A tripartite partnership with Baker Hughes and Computer Modelling Group (CMG) combines SpotLight’s monitoring layer with CMG’s reservoir simulation and Baker Hughes’s field equipment into one end-to-end offering spanning model, seismic and acquisition (Morgan et al., 2026a).

In 2026, a Stanford University team built an entire methodological framework for planning sparse, focused seismic surveys inspired by SpotLight’s published work, citing four of its papers as the foundation for what they term an ‘ultra-light monitoring approach’ (Hu, Liu and Mukerji, 2026) – not a partnership SpotLight sought or shaped, but an independent group reaching the same starting point through its own literature review. Hovorka et al. (2026), at the University of Texas at Austin, sit in the same category, positioning focused monitoring within the wider evolution of storage surveillance. Neither was commissioned by SpotLight; both were prompted by the concerns of operators they work alongside – academic diffusion here travels through clients rather than around them, a convergence of interest between operator, academic institution and service provider that CCS needs to reach maturity.

Regulatory alignment

The appearance of ‘focused’ seismic monitoring in individual regulatory reviews, not only general standards, is a further sign of how far the paradigm has diffused. In a non-binding opinion issued on 28 January 2026 under Article 10 of Directive 2009/31/ EC – through which the European Commission comments on a national authority’s draft decision – the commission noted, on the Prinos CO2 storage permit in Greece, that it ‘recommends the use of shallow focused 3D seismic surveys to monitor and estimate any potential leakage of CO2 to the shallow subsurface’ (European Commission, 2026): ‘focused’ seismic monitoring treated, at EU member state level, as a legitimate tool for CCS field surveillance.

Worldwide impact through technical references

SpotLight’s own publication record and the external citations of it grew together, though not at the same pace: external citations began appearing in 2022 and grew every year since, as the method accumulated milestones for others to point to (Figure 5). Counts reflect distinct citing entities rather than raw citation events – a team publishing the same result across several venues is counted once, in its first year.

Each external citation was classified into one of these four categories based on the citing organisation’s stated affiliation and the manifest content of the citing paper – a client project, a formal partnership, a service provider, or an independent academic study (Figure 6).

A second pattern emerges from how the wider industry engages with this published work rather than with SpotLight directly. North America shows the broadest mix of signals – academic evangelisation, client engagement, vendor partnerships and, notably, other service providers building parallel focused sparse-seismic approaches of their own, evidence that the underlying paradigm is taking root there. Europe’s engagement, by contrast, is dominated by client signals – operators citing the methodology while conducting their own, more cautious, in-house evaluation. Asia’s engagement is purely academic for now. These are two different mechanisms of adoption, not simply two speeds, broadly tracking the CCS market maturity of each region.

The structure of a technology adoption journey

Taken together, SpotLight’s own history and the record of how others have engaged with it describe a four-stage journey (Figure 7). Validation established that the physics worked, using cases entirely outside CCS. Field proof – Greensand and Weyburn among them – established that it worked under CCS-specific conditions of cost, regulation and scrutiny. Client buy-in broadened the base beyond the first few believers into a list spanning multiple continents and reservoir types. Diffusion, the stage the company did not control, carried the method into other organisations’ technology roadmaps and into regulatory review – Stanford’s academic framework (Hu, Liu and Mukerji, 2026), ExxonMobil’s technology readiness assessment (Nolan et al., 2026), and the European Commission’s reference (European Commission, 2026) to focused seismic for legacy-well leakage monitoring at Prinos.

The biggest challenge in this journey was not only benchmarking against an existing technology. It was securing real deployments, onshore and offshore, learning from both failures and successes, and documenting that record openly and transparently to build trust among stakeholders. That combination of open documentation and continued deployment, more than any single technical result, is what let the four stages described above unfold.

None of these stages can be skipped, and none is guaranteed to happen quickly. One limit should be stated plainly: even long-running projects such as Sleipner or the Weyburn CO2- EOR scheme have not been monitored for the thirty to sixty years a storage permit contemplates under today’s regulatory framework, since both predate the permit-based regimes – ISO 27914, the EU CCS Directive – this paper discusses. Every claim made here about long-term performance under that framework is therefore a projection from injection-phase evidence, not a demonstration. What can be shown now is the discipline of the approach: measurements tied to a model, a record of successes and failures kept openly, and evidence a regulator can review at each phase. Any subsurface monitoring technology entering CCS will likely need to re-earn trust at each of these four stages, even where the physics is already settled, because what is being adopted is a claim on safety, cost and public confidence, not just a measurement method.

Conclusions

Adapting a monitoring technology to the energy transition is a journey, not a switch to flip, and the industry’s caution reflects a genuinely higher evidentiary bar – physical, regulatory, reputational – than oil and gas monitoring ever had to clear. SpotLight’s trajectory illustrates one instance, built up piece by piece across the sections above.

Validation established that a single source-receiver pair could detect a reliable 4D signal at all, across rock types with nothing to do with CO2. Field proof turned that physics into an operational fact under real CO2 storage conditions, and it was real people, at real fields, who made the call: at Greensand, an operator tried a supply vessel already on site to acquire the data (and succeeded), rather than commissioning a dedicated survey; at Weyburn, an operator chose spot seismic to be tested and challenged, repeatedly, onshore, against its own 4D benchmark. A counter-example in Oman (steam, not CO2) then showed the same maturity from the opposite direction: a real failure that hardened the method against ground roll rather than being hidden.

Client buy-in broadened that base commercially; the Baker Hughes/CMG partnership marked a shift from client relationship to strategic partnership. Regulatory alignment came without planning for it: the service offering shaped by client requests turned out to match the three phases ISO 27914:2026 requires. The European Commission’s review of Prinos separately showed the same approach recognised at EU level. Diffusion then carried the method into Stanford’s academic framework, ExxonMobil’s technology readiness assessment, and citation across five continents.

What that diffusion also revealed is that no single measurement carries a storage permit on its own. Focused seismic answers a bounded question – has the subsurface changed where the model said it would – and its value grows in combination with predictive monitoring, flow modelling, and the remediation options an operator holds in reserve. The direction of travel is towards coherent monitoring toolboxes built around a risk register, not one technique displacing another. 

The next silo to fall is likely to be the one separating operators and regulators from the parties who ultimately price the risk: certification bodies and insurers have begun to take up subsurface surveillance directly, on the view that a monitoring record legible to an underwriter is itself a condition for storage projects to be financed and insured at scale.

Six years separate the first deployment in 2020 from the first pressure-front detection offshore in 2026, and it was only in that same year that peer-reviewed literature, in the strict sense, began appearing. SpotLight’s ten years suggest that trust of this kind can be earned – by moving through every stage, in roughly this order, and documenting failures as openly as successes. If this account serves any purpose beyond the record, it is as an invitation to others to shorten the journey further than SpotLight managed to.

Acknowledgements

None of this would have been possible without partners willing to try, and sometimes fail, alongside SpotLight: every client, contractor and research collaborator named throughout this paper, and the expert committee whose review shaped this technology further along the years. Each project shaped both the technology and the account given here, and SpotLight hopes to keep learning alongside these and future partners for the next ten years.

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