Microearthquakes in west Texas: Induced or not?

Jing, Hongli; Zhou, Hua‐wei; Li, Aibing

doi:10.1190/segam2017-17749188.1

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 16 publications

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“…Seismicity in the Permian Basin has historically occurred in several localized areas (Figure 1), including parts of the Central Basin Platform and around the Dagger Draw and Cogdell fields (Sanford et al, 2006;Gan and Frohlich, 2013;Pursley et al, 2013;Herzog, 2014;Frohlich et al, 2016). Since about 2009, seismicity has occurred in the southern Delaware Basin (Jing et al, 2017), an area where the USGS National Earthquake Information Center and Keller et al (1987) report very little previous seismicity. Since the TexNet Seismological Network (Savvaidis et al, 2017) began recording Jens-Erik Lund Snee 1 and Mark D. Zoback 1 earthquakes across Texas in January 2017, at least three groups of earthquakes, surrounded by more diffusely located events, have occurred in the southern Delaware Basin, near Pecos, Texas.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

State of stress in the Permian Basin, Texas and New Mexico: Implications for induced seismicity

2018

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Since the 1960s, the Permian Basin of west Texas and southeast New Mexico has experienced earthquakes that were possibly triggered by oil and gas activities. In recent years, seismicity has been concentrated near Pecos, Texas; around the Dagger Draw Field, New Mexico; and near the Cogdell Field, Snyder, Texas. We have collected hundreds of measurements of stress orientation and relative magnitude to identify potentially active normal, normal/strike-slip, or strike-slip faults that might be susceptible to earthquake triggering in this region. In the Midland Basin and Central Basin Platform, the faulting regime is consistently normal/strike slip, and the direction of the maximum horizontal compressive stress (SHmax) is approximately east–west, although modest rotations of the SHmax direction are seen in some areas. Within the Delaware Basin, however, a large-magnitude clockwise rotation (∼150°) of SHmax occurs progressively from being nearly north–south in the north to east-southeast–west-northwest in the south, including the western Val Verde Basin. A normal faulting stress field is observed throughout the Delaware Basin. We use these stress data to estimate the potential for slip on mapped faults across the Permian Basin in response to injection-related pressure changes at depth that might be associated with future oil and gas development activities in the region.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

State of stress in the Permian Basin, Texas and New Mexico: Implications for induced seismicity

2018

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Passive seismic measurement of seismic attenuation in Delaware Basin

et al. 2019

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Local earthquake activity can be employed to measure attenuation (the effective quality factor [Q]) and characterize production in the Delaware Basin, Texas, USA. To illustrate this, we employed data from the recently installed Texas Seismic Network (TexNet) seismic stations collected in the west Texas area between April 2017 and March 2018. Earthquake activity in the Delaware Basin has increased in comparison to the previous 20 years, which has resulted in numerous high-quality events suitable for this analysis. The high signal-to-noise ratio events were used to estimate effective Q factors using the peak frequency method on the sediments of the Delaware Basin. The effective attenuation of the sedimentary basin is 90 for P-waves and 140 for S-waves (both with uncertainty of approximately 30), indicating an unusually low attenuation (high Q) for S-waves relative to the P-waves. This is consistent with attenuation of a saturated sedimentary basin because the saturation results in less attenuation of S-waves. Additionally, we observe an increase of the effective Q factor with distance between the station and events consistent with rays sampling the deeper, less-attenuating, and less-saturated portions of the basin and even basement. Inverted effective attenuation coefficients were used to calculate moment magnitudes, which were consistent with those seen in the TexNet array.

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Complex Shear-Wave Anisotropy from Induced Earthquakes in West Texas

Robinson

Savvaidis

et al. 2020

Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America

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We have analyzed shear-wave splitting (SWS) data from local earthquakes in the Permian basin in west Texas to understand crustal stress change and induced seismicity. Two SWS parameters, the fast polarization direction and the delay time, are computed using a semiautomatic algorithm. Most measurements are determined in the Delaware basin and the Snyder area. In both regions, SWS fast directions are mostly consistent with local SHmax at stations that are relatively far from the earthquake clusters. Varying fast directions at one station are related to different ray paths and are probably caused by heterogeneity. In the Snyder area, most northeast–southwest fast directions are from the events in the northern part of the cluster, whereas the northwest–southeast fast directions are mostly from the southern part. The northeast–southwest and northwest–southeast fast directions could be attributed to the northeast-trending normal faults and the northwest-trending strike-slip faults, respectively. SWS results in the Delaware basin have two unique features. First, most shallow earthquakes less than 4 km deep produce relatively large delay times. This observation implies that the upper crust of the Delaware basin is highly fractured, as indicated by the increasing number of induced earthquakes. Second, diverse fast directions are observed at the stations in the high-seismicity region, likely caused by the presence of multiple sets of cracks with different orientations. This situation is possible in the crust with high pore pressure, which is expected in the Delaware basin due to extensive wastewater injection and hydraulic fracturing. We propose that the diversity of SWS fast directions could be a typical phenomenon in regions with a high rate of induced seismicity.

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Microearthquakes in west Texas: Induced or not?

Cited by 3 publications

References 16 publications

State of stress in the Permian Basin, Texas and New Mexico: Implications for induced seismicity

State of stress in the Permian Basin, Texas and New Mexico: Implications for induced seismicity

Passive seismic measurement of seismic attenuation in Delaware Basin

Complex Shear-Wave Anisotropy from Induced Earthquakes in West Texas

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