Monitoring and analysing long-term vertical time-series deformation due to oil and gas extraction using multi-track SAR dataset: A study on lost hills oilfield

Abstract

The Lost Hills oilfield, located ∼70 km northwest of Bakersfield in the San Joaquin Valley, has a long history of oil/gas extraction, and it suffers from long-term ground deformation. Many SAR datasets include information about the Lost Hills oilfield over the past two decades. This study focused on calculating and analysing the long-term vertical ground deformation due to oil and gas extraction in the Lost Hills oilfield and proposed a new strategy inspired by the “Small Baseline Subset” idea for jointly processing multi-track SAR images to obtain long-term time-series deformations. The experimental results showed a maximum vertical deformation rate of 20 mm/year in the uplift region and –90 mm/year in the subsidence region of the Lost Hills field from August 1995 to September 2010, and the long-term vertical time-series deformations had a precision of 5 mm. In addition, a multivariate polynomial regression model was used to quantify the relationship between surface deformation volume changes and water, oil, and gas injection-production data. The results demonstrated that the relationship between the ground volume change and injection/production dataset in the subsidence region followed a multivariate linear model, whereas the uplift region satisfied a multivariate quadratic polynomial model. The modelling results provided a new perspective on interpreting ground deformation due to oil/gas extraction.