SPEAKER: Bing Li (Caltech)
DATE: 4:00pm, Friday, January 8th, 2021

TITLE: Induced Seismicity in North Texas

ABSTRACT: 
The Barnett shale formation in the Bend-Arch Fort Worth Basin in Northeast Texas is a tight gas reservoir, where hydrocarbon production has greatly benefitted from the development of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies. To date, over 600 billion cubic meters of gas has been extracted from the reservoir, however significant seismic activity has been detected since 2008 in the previously quiescent Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex which overlies the Barnett, and was initially attributed to the large volumes of saltwater injected into the permeable Ellenburger limestone formation underlying the Barnett shale. In time, some of the earthquake locations have become more spatially dispersed, and there is some evidence that the poroelastic stress changes from produced gas and co-produced water contribute to ongoing fault instability. I will present a view of the spatio-temporal distribution of seismicity, and explore its relation to modelled pore pressure and poroelastic stress changes over time at the basin scale, as well as efforts to calibrate the modelled displacements to geodetic measurements