Oil and Gas Daily
Originally Posted: April 30, 2015
Combination of gas field fluid injection and removal cause of earthquakes
Several natural and man-made factors can influence the subsurface stress regime resulting in earthquakes. Natural ones include intraplate stress changes related to plate tectonics and natural water table or lake level variations caused by changing weather patterns or water drainage patterns over time, or advance or retreat of glaciers. Man-made include human-generated changes to the water table, including dam construction, and industrial activities involving the injection or removal of fluids from the subsurface.
A seismology team led by Southern Methodist University (SMU), Dallas, finds that high volumes of wastewater injection combined with saltwater (brine) extraction from natural gas wells is the most likely cause of earthquakes occurring near Azle, Texas, from late 2013 through spring 2014.
In an area where the seismology team identified two intersecting faults, they developed a sophisticated 3D model to assess the changing fluid pressure within a rock formation in the affected area. They used the model to estimate stress changes induced in the area by two wastewater injection wells and the more than 70 production wells that remove both natural gas and significant volumes of salty water known as brine.
Conclusions from the modeling study integrate a broad-range of estimates for uncertain subsurface conditions. Ultimately, better information on fluid volumes, flow parameters, and subsurface pressures in the region will provide more accurate estimates of the fluid pressure along this fault.
“The model shows that a pressure differential develops along one of the faults as a combined result of high fluid injection rates to the west and high water removal rates to the east,” said Matthew Hornbach, SMU associate professor of geophysics. “When we ran the model over a 10-year period through a wide range of parameters, it predicted pressure changes significant enough to trigger earthquakes on faults that are already stressed.” READ MORE