Reservoir characterization using surface microseismic monitoring

Abstract

Microseismic monitoring of reservoir processes can be performed using surface or near-surface arrays. We review the published technical basis for the use of the arrays and the historical development of the method, beginning with locating earthquakes through geothermal exploration to the growing field of hydraulic-fracture monitoring. Practical considerations for the array deployment and data processing are presented. The road ahead for the technology includes a move toward life-of-field buried arrays as well as opportunities for extended interpretation of the data, particularly inversion for source-mechanism estimation and measurement of anisotropy in the monitored subsurface.

Uncertainty in surface microseismic monitoring

“…Microseismic monitoring with surface arrays offers several advantages over borehole monitoring. Surface arrays do not require dedicated monitoring borehole, they offer a much larger field of view allowing long laterals to be monitored in their entirety and consistency (Duncan and Eisner, 2010). Moreover, surface deployment of large 2D or 3D arrays captures a large portion of the emitted microseismic wave field, enabling well constrained event imaging with only compressional waves significantly reducing the sensitivity to velocity model assumptions.…”

Advances and Challenges of Reservoir Characterization: A Review of the Current State-of-the-Art

“…Data extracted from digital outcrop model can be incorporated into reservoir model. Details for scanning lidar and radar technology with its application in digital outcrop study can be referred in paper purposed by Bellian et al (2005) and Buckley et al (Bailey, 1973;Duncan and Eisner, 2010;Maxwell et al, 2010). To plot the estimates of the event hypocenter locations on an event-by-event basis over time is currently the common practice for reporting the result of microseismic monitoring.…”

“…(1) hodogram techniques based upon the particle motion of direct arrivals, which is the simplest method and using only one three-component (3C) sensor (Albright and Hanold, 1976), (2) triangulation schemes based upon arrival times of direct waves by combinations of P-and/or S-waves at multiple stations (Gibowicz and Kijko, 1994), and (3) semblance methods based upon stacking waves without arrival-time picking. All three classes of location techniques can be used in conjunction with surface or downhole sensors (Duncan and Eisner, 2010). However, many researchers have developed other approaches on passive seismic emission tomography such as long-time-interval stacking similar to semblance (Kuznetsov et al, 2006;Kochnev et al, 2007) and picking the maximum amplitude of the P-wave migration as the imaging condition (Chambers et al, 2008(Chambers et al, , 2009a(Chambers et al, , 2009bRobein et al, 2009).…”

“…Usually linear groups of vertical phones are laid out along the spokes of a wheel centered on the wellhead of the treatment well. Details of data gathering, processing and migration about the technique have been investigated by Duncan and Eisner (2010).…”

“…Seismic imaging technologies either single-sensor seismic data processing or calibration of seismic amplitude and attributes showed advantages in porosity detection and reservoir modeling (Slatt and Mark, 2002;Refae et al, 2008). Surface microseismic monitoring was also used for hydraulic-fracture monitoring in reservoir characterization of development stage (Duncan and Eisner, 2010). In this chapter, there are two main purposes of the author.…”