Assessment of the induced seismicity potential in pressurized and depleted reservoirs: the role of fault permeability

Induced seismicity during reservoir pressurization or depletion has become a widespread issue (Ferronato et al., 2010; Ellsworth 2013) as a result of the proliferation of geo-energy projects (Foulger et al., 2018). Faults intersecting the injection/pumping formation undergo pore pressure and stress changes, affecting their stability. The hydraulic properties of faults (e.g., permeability) control the pore pressure change which, through poromechanical effects, increases the total stress in the rock. Faults cause additional stress change (Gheibi et al., 2017) that is further enhanced by fault offset (Buijze et al., 2017), which can increase the frequency of induced earthquakes. Thus, predicting the stress variation in presence of displaced faults is particularly relevant in order to minimize the induced seismicity risk. Analytical solutions provide accurate and fast predictions and are well suited to gain insights into the physical mechanisms. For the problem of reservoir pressurization/depletion, Eshelby’s inclusion theory (Eshelby, 1957) is at the heart of several existing analytical solutions that either assume non-displaced faults (e.g., Segall, 1992; Soltanzadeh and Hawkees, 2008; Wang et al. 2016) or displaced but permeable faults (Jansen et al., 2019). Since no solution existed for lowpermeable faults that cross the reservoir with an offset, we have developed one (Wu et al., 2020). In this paper, we analyse the difference in terms of induced seismicity potential in response to injection/pumping into a reservoir crossed by a displaced fault that could be either permeable or impermeable.

Bibliographic Details

Main Authors:	Wu, Haiqing, Vilarrasa, Víctor, De Simone, Silvia, Saaltink, Maarten, Parisio, Francesco
Other Authors:	European Research Council
Format:	comunicación de congreso biblioteca
Language:	English
Published:	2020-10-11
Subjects:	Induced Seismicity, Fault permeability,
Online Access:	http://hdl.handle.net/10261/224409 http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000781
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