Abstract
AbstractWe demonstrate that pore pressure and stress changes resulting from several decades of oil and gas production significantly affect the likelihood of injection-related induced seismicity. We illustrate this process in the Delaware Basin (western Texas and southeastern New Mexico, USA), in which hydraulic fracturing and waste-water injection have been inducing numerous earthquakes in the southernmost part of the basin where there has been no prior oil and gas production from the formations in which the earthquakes are now occurring. In the seismically quiescent part of the basin, we show that pore-pressure and poroelastic-stress changes associated with prior oil and gas production make induced seismicity less likely. The findings of this study have important implications for the feasibility of large-scale carbon storage in depleted oil and gas reservoirs.
Highlights
Understanding where and how anthropogenic processes that increase pore pressure at depth could potentially induce seismicity is important for seismic hazard mitigation
We show that while knowledge of the preexisting state of stress, pore pressure, and distribution of pre-existing faults enables one to predict the potential occurrence of induced seismicity, processes such as pore-pressure and stress changes associated with prior oil and gas production can significantly reduce the likelihood of induced seismicity
We investigate these phenomena in the Delaware Basin of western Texas and southeastern New Mexico (USA), where several studies link recent seismicity in the southernmost part of the basin to hydraulic fracturing and waste-water injection (e.g., Lomax and Savvaidis, 2019; Skoumal et al, 2020; Savvaidis et al, 2020)
Summary
Understanding where and how anthropogenic processes that increase pore pressure at depth (waste-water injection, hydraulic fracturing, CO2 injection, stimulation of geothermal wells, etc.) could potentially induce seismicity is important for seismic hazard mitigation. This earthquake sequence is spatially removed from the concentration of seismicity in Reeves and Pecos Counties (Texas) and appears to be associated with slip on deep, basement-rooted faults, possibly in response to waste-water injection at great depth occurring in that area.
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