Diagnostic and predictive analysis of production and injection‐induced fault activation

Abstract

AbstractMitigating the hazard of fault reactivation during CO injection and oil production is important for ensuring environmental sustainability of geologic carbon sequestration and hydrocarbon recovery. Currently, we do not know how the Coulomb Failure Stress (CFS), which is a commonly used metric to assess the potential of inducing slip on a fault, evolves differently for gas injection and oil production scenarios. Using high‐resolution simulations of CO injection‐induced and oil production‐induced fault slip and theories of Coulomb failure and poroelasticity, we address this gap in knowledge. We analyze the fault tractions, slip, and reservoir pressure to understand how a fault is destabilized in successive steps, how hypocenter locations are selected, and how these processes differ between injection and production. We extract and summarize the characteristic features of induced fault activation in terms of the dependence of CFS and the Fault Stress Ratio (FSR) on the dimensionless reservoir pressure perturbation caused by injection or production. We apply the framework to the Farnsworth oilfield in Texas, which is undergoing CO injection and oil production, to disambiguate observations related to fault stability. Finally, we discuss how our framework can inform models that aim to forecast fluid flow‐induced slip and mitigate the induced seismicity hazard in oilfields and gas storage sites.