Abstract

In oil and gas production, a process known as hydraulic fracturing is often used to increase productivity of aging reservoirs. Hydraulic fracturing involves pumping various types of fluids under pressure down a treatment well into a reservoir. When the pressurized fluid enters the reservoir, it fractures reservoir rock. To keep these fractures highly permeable solid particles, known as proppant are pumped with fluid into the created fractures. Creation of fractures generates microseismic events usually with magnitude below Mw=-0.5 (lowest detected events are Mw~-3). Elastic waves created by these microseismic events can be monitored with geophones in a monitoring well (hydraulic fracture monitoring – HFM ).

These datasets were analyzed as part of IMAGES project – European Union funded Transfer Of Knowledge Industry-Academia Partnership between petroleum industry and global earthquake seismology academic research. This talk will discuss seismological aspects of locations from the dataset acquired during hydraulic fracture monitoring campaigns. I shall explain velocity model building for HFM , location techniques of hypocetres, source mechanisms of the induced events.