InSAR Reveals Complex Uplift and Subsidence Patterns Over 100,000 km2 of Oil Producing Regions in the Permian Basin
Abstract
The Permian Basin has seen a sharp rise in the rate of seismicity in the past decade. Wastewater injection and hydrocarbon extraction can alter the subsurface stress acting on existing faults, which can induce fault reactivation and produce earthquakes. Changes in pore pressure can produce surface deformation that is detectable by InSAR, and these surface displacements can be used to infer dynamic changes in the subsurface and help understand the conditions associated with reported seismicity.
Previous InSAR studies on production/injection-related deformation signals have focused on local regions ~50-100 square km. However, the production extends across the entire Permian Basin, and seismic activity is spatially clustered. Here we present the cumulative vertical deformation between Nov. 2014 and Dec. 2017 over a 100,000 km2 region of the Permian. We detected vertical displacements on the order of 2 to 10 cm, organized geometrically into bowls and lineations. Potential causes of these deformations include wastewater and CO2 injection, groundwater production, sinkhole development, and limestone dissolution near Pecos and Midland. The most important signals we observed are the ~70 km lineation patterns of 5-10 cm of subsidence located close to areas of oil production and salt dissolution near a seismic hotspot south of Pecos. The magnitude of deformation changes substantially across several faults where clustered seismic activity has occurred. We calibrated and adjusted the InSAR results using available GPS data. To produce the InSAR results at this scale, we processed the ascending path 78 and descending path 85 of Sentinel-1 data at 1/3 the native SAR resolution, saving 10x on disk space before finding smaller areas of interest. We used NASA's High-End Computing facility to convert over 500 Sentinel frames acquired between November 2014 and December 2017 into geocoded single-look complex (SLC) images. Newer SAR scenes can be processed independently and added to the existing SAR data repository. We have created a small baseline subset (SBAS) time series processing framework written in Julia that can accommodate a variety of surface deformation models, multiple viewing geometries, and auxiliary data, such as GPS, to generate eastward and vertical surface deformation history from over 2500 interferograms.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.S21B..03S
- Keywords:
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- 7209 Earthquake dynamics;
- SEISMOLOGY;
- 7223 Earthquake interaction;
- forecasting;
- and prediction;
- SEISMOLOGY;
- 7230 Seismicity and tectonics;
- SEISMOLOGY;
- 8168 Stresses: general;
- TECTONOPHYSICS