Research offers insights into Permian Basin earthquake hazards
A new collection of published papers offers the most detailed and comprehensive breakdown yet of how water injected into the Permian Basin during oil and gas operations is changing subsurface pressures and causing earthquakes.
InSAR-observed surface deformation in New Mexico’s Permian Basin shows threats and opportunities presented by leaky injection wells - Scientific Reports
Knowledge of aquifer dynamics, including groundwater storage changes, is key to effective groundwater resource and reservoir management. Resolving and accurate modeling of these processes requires knowledge of subsurface poroelastic properties and lateral heterogeneity within units of interest. Computationally demanding methods for determining lateral heterogeneity in poroelastic properties exist but remain difficult to practically employ. The InSAR-based detection of uplift over a New Mexico well with a casing breach provides an opportunity to determine poroelastic properties using a tractable 2D analytical plane strain solution for surface uplift created by a pressurized reservoir with overburden. Using a Bayesian inversion framework, we calculate poroelastic properties under deep (depth of well-screen) and shallow (depth of well-breach) conditions. We find that shallow injection is necessary to produce the observed deformation. However, pressure-varying forward solutions for uplift are required to reproduce the temporal evolution of deformation. For this we use realistic shallow poroelastic properties and well dynamics, which reflect the evolving injection conditions at the well breach as the casing further erodes. Analysis of individual interferograms or InSAR time series may provide insights into shallow subsurface heterogeneity or anomalous injection conditions at operating wells more rapidly than scheduled field inspections.
When should operations that cause earthquakes stop?
Schultz et al. answer this for the UK, using risk-informed tools that account for aftershock-like earthquakes following well shut-in.
Read now: https://doi.org/10.26443/seismica.v2i2.1086
#Seismology #EarthquakeScience #DiamondOpenAccess #Earthquake #OpenAccess #OpenScience #inducedseismicity #risk
Re-
#introduction, this time with added hashtags
Hello (again). I’m Dr Ian Stimpson, Senior Lecturer in
#Geophysics at
#KeeleUniversity, UK.
Background in
#Geology &
#Seismology these days mostly involved with
#Scicomm via
http://tcs.ah-epos.eu (
#InducedSeismicity).
Lecture in
#NearSurfaceGeophysics #Geoconservation #StructuralGeology &
#ReservoirGeophysics plus the odd bit of
#Python #GIS and
#RemoteSensing. Compiler of
#Geotrails recorder of
#Earthquakes and
#Lidar scanner of pot banks.
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Dr Ian G Stimpson