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The role of passive microseismic monitoring in the instrumented oil field

Engineering Seismology Group Canada Inc., Kingston, Ontario, Canada

Corresponding author: S. Maxwell, maxwell@esg.ca

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

With the current industry trend toward instrumented oil fields and smart well completions, the permanent deployment of geophones or other acoustic sensors to complement standard engineering gauges is being promoted as a way to map reservoir dynamics. The biggest push is from the time-lapse seismic practitioners, although the deployment of permanent seismic instrumentation is also potentially an ideal route to monitor passive seismicity.

Passive monitoring of acoustic emissions, or small magnitude microearthquakes (microseismicity) associated with stress changes in and around the reservoir, can also be used to image the reservoir dynamics. Passive monitoring has the benefit of more fully utilizing the seismic sensors to monitor during the periods between the conventional seismic surveys and offers complimentary information to both active time-lapse images and engineering measurements.

Microseismic events, related to either induced movements on preexisting structures or the creation of new fractures, capture deformations as the rock mass reacts to stresses and strains associated with pressure changes in the reservoir. The microseismicity can be used to localize the fracturing or to deduce geomechanical details of the deformation. Since the Rangely experiment in the late 1960s, a number of passive seismic experiments have been pursued in the petroleum industry with varying degrees of success.

Recently, a number of independent operators have successfully implemented passive seismic studies to address specific issues. The majority of these studies are under the umbrella of hydraulic fracturing, where the microseismicity is used to directly map the fracture growth during well stimulations. However, a number of other studies have been used to image deformations associated with primary production, secondary recovery, or waste injection operations. In the vast majority of these cases, an array of seismic sensors are deployed by wireline to monitor for a specific period. This requires finding a well close to the action to facilitate detection . . . [Full Text of this Article]