Characterization of an Earthquake Sequence Triggered by Hydraulic Fracturing in Harrison County, Ohio

Abstract

Online Material: Tables of hypoinverse earthquake locations and velocity models. To extract oil and gas in tight shale formations, hydraulic fracturing is used to stimulate fracture growth and increase permeability. Typically, low (−3.0 to 0.0 M w) magnitude earthquakes are produced during hydraulic fracturing (Maxwell et al. , 2002, 2009). In a few cases, however, hydraulic fracturing has been linked to widely observed larger, so‐called positive magnitude, earthquakes. Examples include earthquakes felt by the general population in such areas as Blackpool, England, M L 2.3 (de Pater and Baisch, 2011), Horn River Basin, Canada, M L 3.8 (British Colombia Oil and Gas Commission [BCOGC], 2012), and Oklahoma M L 2.9 (Holland, 2011, 2013) and more recently in Ohio (Skoumal et al. , 2014). In this paper, we show the first evidence of positive magnitude earthquakes on a previously unmapped fault in Harrison County, Ohio, that can be related to a hydraulic fracture operation. A series of six earthquakes were located by the Array Network Facility regional seismic network using the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) EarthScope Transportable Array (TA) stations in Ohio on 2 October 2013. These earthquakes were located south of Clendening Lake in Harrison County near the town of Uhrichsville, Ohio, and included two M w 2.0 events. This series of earthquakes was followed by four more events with M w 1.7–2.2 from 3 to 19 October. There were no felt reports for any of these earthquakes. Upon inspection of the OhioSeis seismic network catalog (Hansen and Ruff, 2003) and other available historical catalogs in the region (Stover and Coffman, 1993), this series of earthquakes …