Hydrocarbon production induced land deformation over Permian Basin; analysis using persistent scatterer interferometry and numerical modeling

Abstract

The Permian Basin, encompassing Southeastern New Mexico and Western Texas, has been an important source of oil and natural gas for over a century for the United States. With recent advancements in petroleum extraction methods, such as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, production has increased exponentially. Such rapid developments, along with the disposal of wastewater back into the subsurface, have caused significant changes in the stress regime of the region’s subsurface, resulting in various geohazards including land subsidence. In this work, we used the Sentinel-1C-band SAR dataset acquired between 2016 and 2021 to measure the basin-wide deformation over the entire Permian Basin. We utilized Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) technique to produce the time-series deformation at millimeter-level accuracy. The average monthly production and injection volumes and well depths over the Delaware Basin in New Mexico were calculated for each well and the impact of the hydrocarbon activities on the deformation was modeled using a distributed point source model from fluid volume and well depth data. The results show that the Permian Basin was deforming at a rate of 3–4 cm/yr., with two large pockets of deformation to the north of the Grisham Fault Zone (GFZ) in the Delaware Basin. The region south of the GFZ shows complex deformation features with linear patterns, indicating the presence of faults hindering fluid flow. Some areas in the Delaware Basin also show an uplift, especially along the Texas side of the border driven by shallow wastewater injection. The Midland Basin is also affected by subsidence with several localized subsidence zones identified in the region. Further, the Midland Basin experienced an increase in intensity and the spatial distribution of the deformation over the last few years. Given both production and injection well data, the modeled deformation results agree with the observed except in two pockets. When only production data is used for the modeling, the modeled deformation shows better agreement with the observed, especially in the interior of New Mexico. The modeling results suggest that the deep wastewater injection has minimal impact on surface deformation in the region. Additionally, it is also possible that the region has undergone inelastic deformation. While we used an elastic model in this preliminary study, a more accurate study requires regional poroelastic modeling to study the interaction between the solid subsurface and fluid hydrocarbons in detail.