Potential Link Between 2020 Mentone, West Texas M5 Earthquake and Nearby Wastewater Injection: Implications for Aquifer Mechanical Properties

Abstract

The M5 Mentone earthquake that occurred on March 26, 2020, was the largest event recorded over the last 2 decades in West Texas within the Delaware Basin, a U.S. major petroleum‐producing area. Also, numerous hydrofracturing and wastewater disposal wells are spread across this region. Within a 30 km distance to mainshock, eight class‐II injection wells for industrial wastewater disposal target the deep porous Ellenburger aquifer at an average rate of 1.36 × 106 barrel (BBL) per month during 2012–2020. Poroelastic models of fluid diffusion show these nearby injectors collectively imparted up to 80.5 kPa of Coulomb stress at the mainshock location, capable of triggering this M5 event. Assuming the Mentone event occurs when pore‐pressure increase is maximum, the time delay between peak injection and the M5 occurrence corresponds with an optimal permeability of 6.76 × 10‐14 m2 for the Ellenburger aquifer layer, in agreement with independent estimates.

Multivariate statistical appraisal of regional susceptibility to induced seismicity: application to the Permian Basin, SW United States

“…A LR approach is adopted because of the current number of factors that attributed to causing induced seismicity in the Permian Basin in published work so far (e.g. Dvory & Zoback, 2021;Savvaidis et al, 2020;Skoumal et al, 2020;Tung et al, 2020;Zhai et al, 2021). It can also be seen from Figure 3 that there is no obvious relationship between certain industrial operations and seismicity.…”

“…As a first step to explore which operational parameters best fit the earthquake occurrence target variable, we first test the null hypothesis that deep saltwater disposal is a primary influence on seismicity, as has been inferred for Oklahoma (e.g. Goebel et al, 2017;Hincks et al, 2018), and has been proposed for the Delaware Basin (Savvaidis et al, 2020;Skoumal et al, 2020Tung et al, 2021). We therefore perform univariate regression using deep SWD feature only to test this hypothesis.…”

“…Earthquakes in the Pecos cluster appear to occur in northwest-southeast trending lineations, and they have generally been low in magnitude with the largest event to date being ML 3.8. To the northwest of the Pecos cluster, there was an emergent zone of seismicity in late 2019 which culminated in a Mw 4.8 earthquake in February 2020 in the Mentone area (Tung et al, 2020). To the west of the Mentone area, there is another intense area of generally low-magnitude seismicity (the "Culberson cluster") which appears to occur relatively far from the densest area of well activity (Figure 1a); (Skoumal et al, 2020).…”

“…Although in Oklahoma near-basement injection clearly induces most seismicity, it remains highly debated as to whether earthquakes in the western Permian Basin are primarily influenced by deep SWD into the Ellenburger Group (Lemons et al, 2019;Skoumal et al, 2020;Tung et al, 2020), HF in the Wolfcamp Group (Savvaidis et al, 2020), shallow SWD into the Delaware Mountain Group (Deng et al, 2020;Zhai et al, 2021), or conventional production of fluids at shallow depth (Deng et al, 2020;Doser et al, 1991Doser et al, , 1992. Moreover, in much of the Permian Basin, there has been production of hydrocarbons from shallow formations, such as the Delaware Mountain Group and Bone Spring Group since the 1970s, which may affect the pre-existing state of stress (Dvory & Zoback, 2021).…”

“…Although there have been several recent studies on seismicity in the Delaware Basin (e.g. Skoumal et al, 2020Tung et al, 2020;Zhai et al, 2021), they have tended to focus on the individual clusters described above rather than taking a holistic view of seismicity across the whole area. Our focus in this paper is to use a statistical approach which can help to identify broad correlations that help to predict the spatial evolution of seismicity over the large area.…”