2016 Hydrofracture Induced Earthquakes in Ohio
Abstract
In the past three years the oil and gas industry's production activity in the Utica shale play in Ohio has induced over 6 sequences of positive magnitude earthquakes. Some have been as large as magnitude 3.0 and a couple were felt events (Friberg et al, 2014; Skoumal et al, 2014). In August of 2016, a series of small earthquakes, magnitude 1.0 to 2.0, were triggered in Guernsey County Ohio that were tied to hydrofracture stimulations on several wells that were being zipper fracked at the time. A template matching algorithm was applied to the largest earthquakes in the August sequence and a number of smaller earthquakes were observed that preceded the largest event in the sequence. Each of these template detections were coincident with hydrofracture stages being stimulated at the time. There were no earthquakes in this area prior to hydrofracture stimulation, and following a temporary shut-in of the well, the earthquake activity ceased. We will present the results from the analysis of this new sequence of hydrofracture induced earthquakes and how changes in the stimulation process affected the earthquakes during further stages.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFM.S43C2888F
- Keywords:
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- 4475 Scaling: spatial and temporal;
- NONLINEAR GEOPHYSICSDE: 7209 Earthquake dynamics;
- SEISMOLOGYDE: 7223 Earthquake interaction;
- forecasting;
- and prediction;
- SEISMOLOGYDE: 8164 Stresses: crust and lithosphere;
- TECTONOPHYSICS