Eight years of passive seismic monitoring at a petroleum field in Oman: A case study

Ibi, O.; Touqi, Nasser Al; Al-Kindy, Fahad; Sarkar, Sudipta; Zhang, Haijiang; Toksöz, M. Nafi; Küleli, H. Sadi

doi:10.1190/1.3059178

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 4 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The study of passive seismic at variant frequency identifies that information about prediction of hydrocarbon reservoir is found at low frequency of less than 10 Hz [1-5, 132] as depicted in Table 9. Based on Table 9, it is clear that the type of geophones used in active seismic acquisition has greater size and is linearly proportional to the velocity over the resonance frequency (about 10 Hz) [25][26][27][28]. Therefore, a new design of the accelerometer is defined which offers a minimal signal roll-off, small size, and weight solution to the larger arrays layout.…”

Section: Sensors In Seismologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Accelerometer Sensor Specifications to Predict Hydrocarbon Using Passive Seismic Technique

2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The ambient seismic ground noise has been investigated in several surveys worldwide in the last 10 years to verify the correlation between observed seismic energy anomalies at the surface and the presence of hydrocarbon reserves beneath. This is due to the premise that anomalies provide information about the geology and potential presence of hydrocarbon. However a technology gap manifested in nonoptimal detection of seismic signals of interest is observed. This is due to the fact that available sensors are not designed on the basis of passive seismic signal attributes and mainly in terms of amplitude and bandwidth. This is because of that fact that passive seismic acquisition requires greater instrumentation sensitivity, noise immunity, and bandwidth, with active seismic acquisition, where vibratory or impulsive sources were utilized to receive reflections through geophones. Therefore, in the case of passive seismic acquisition, it is necessary to select the best monitoring equipment for its success or failure. Hence, concerning sensors performance, this paper highlights the technological gap and motivates developing dedicated sensors for optimal solution at lower frequencies. Thus, the improved passive seismic recording helps in oil and gas industry to perform better fracture mapping and identify more appropriate stratigraphy at low frequencies.

show abstract

Section: Sensors In Seismologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Accelerometer Sensor Specifications to Predict Hydrocarbon Using Passive Seismic Technique

2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The distribution of induced events in the field is shown in Fig. 6 (Sarkar 2008;Sarkar et al 2008;Zhang et al 2009). All the events have a residual traveltime less than 30 ms, indicating they are well located.…”

Section: A P P L I C At I O N T O I N D U C E D S E I S M I C I T Y Amentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, the gas/oil extraction can cause reservoir compaction and reactivate pre-existing faults and induce earthquakes (e.g. Chan & Zoback 2007;Miyazawa et al 2008;Sarkar et al 2008). By studying the patterns of the induced seismicity over an extended time period (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Focal mechanism determination using high-frequency waveform matching and its application to small magnitude induced earthquakes

Li¹,

Zhang²,

Küleli³

et al. 2011

Geophysical Journal International

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

S U M M A R YWe present a new method using high-frequency full waveform information to determine the focal mechanisms of small, local earthquakes monitored by a sparse surface network. During the waveform inversion, we maximize both the phase and amplitude matching between the observed and modelled waveforms. In addition, we use the polarities of the first P-wave arrivals and the average S/P amplitude ratios to better constrain the matching. An objective function is constructed to include all four criteria. An optimized grid search method is used to search over all possible ranges of source parameters (strike, dip and rake). To speed up the algorithm, a library of Green's functions is pre-calculated for each of the moment tensor components and possible earthquake locations. Optimizations in filtering and cross correlation are performed to further speed the grid search algorithm. The new method is tested on a five-station surface network used for monitoring induced seismicity at a petroleum field. The synthetic test showed that our method is robust and efficient to determine the focal mechanism when using only the vertical component of seismograms in the frequency range of 3-9 Hz. The application to dozens of induced seismic events showed satisfactory waveform matching between modelled and observed seismograms. The majority of the events have a strike direction parallel with the major NE-SW faults in the region. The normal faulting mechanism is dominant, which suggests the vertical stress is larger than the horizontal stress.

show abstract

“…The distribution of induced events in the field recorded by the surface network is shown in Figure 1 (Sarkar, 2008;Sarkar et al, 2008;Zhang et al, 2009). All the events have a residual traveltime of less than 30 ms, indicating they are well located.…”

Section: Induced Microearthquake Datasetmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(Rutledge & Phillips, 2003;Rutledge et al, 2004;Suckale, 2010;Maxwell et al, 2010). For example, the gas/oil extraction can cause reservoir compaction and reactivate preexisting faults and induce microearthquakes (e.g., Chan & Zoback, 2007;Miyazawa et al, 2008;Sarkar et al, 2008), or injection of water causes the decrease of effective stress and slippage along preexisting faults (Grasso, 1992). The reactivation of preexisting faults is very likely responsible for the sheared casings of production wells in some fields (Maury et al, 1992) or is a serious source of wellbore instability during drillings (Willson et al, 1998;Zoback & Zinke, 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Focal mechanism determination of induced microearthquakes in an oil field using full waveforms from shallow and deep seismic networks

Küleli

Zhang

et al. 2011

GEOPHYSICS

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A new, high frequency, full waveform matching method is used to study the focal mechanisms of small, local earthquakes induced in an oil field, which are monitored by a sparse near-surface network and a deep borehole network. The determined source properties are helpful for understanding the local stress regime in this field. During the waveform inversion, we maximize both the phase and amplitude matching between the observed and modeled waveforms. We also use the polarities of the first P-wave arrivals and the average S/P amplitude ratios to better constrain the matching. An objective function is constructed to include all four criteria. For different hypocenters and source types, comprehensive synthetic tests show that our method is robust to determine the focal mechanisms under the current array geometries, even when there is considerable velocity inaccuracy. The application to several tens of induced microseismic events showed satisfactory waveform matching between modeled and observed seismograms. The majority of the events have a strike direction parallel with the major NE-SW faults in the region, and some events trend parallel with the NW-SE conjugate faults. The results are consistent with the in-situ well breakout measurements and the current knowledge on the stress direction of this region. The source mechanisms of the studied events together with the hypocenter distribution indicate that the microearthquakes are caused by the reactivation of preexisting faults. We observed that the faulting mechanism varies with depth, from strike-slip dominance at shallower depth to normal faulting dominance at greater depth.

show abstract

Eight years of passive seismic monitoring at a petroleum field in Oman: A case study

Cited by 6 publications

References 4 publications

Accelerometer Sensor Specifications to Predict Hydrocarbon Using Passive Seismic Technique

Accelerometer Sensor Specifications to Predict Hydrocarbon Using Passive Seismic Technique

Focal mechanism determination using high-frequency waveform matching and its application to small magnitude induced earthquakes

Focal mechanism determination of induced microearthquakes in an oil field using full waveforms from shallow and deep seismic networks

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About