Energies (May 2023)

Microseismic Monitoring at the Farnsworth CO<sub>2</sub>-EOR Field

  • Yan Qin,
  • Jiaxuan Li,
  • Lianjie Huang,
  • Kai Gao,
  • David Li,
  • Ting Chen,
  • Tom Bratton,
  • George El-kaseeh,
  • William Ampomah,
  • Titus Ispirescu,
  • Martha Cather,
  • Robert Balch,
  • Yingcai Zheng,
  • Shuhang Tang,
  • Kevin L. McCormack,
  • Brian McPherson

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/en16104177
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 16, no. 10
p. 4177

Abstract

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The Farnsworth Unit in northern Texas is a field site for studying geologic carbon storage during enhanced oil recovery (EOR) using CO2. Microseismic monitoring is essential for risk assessment by detecting fluid leakage and fractures. We analyzed borehole microseismic data acquired during CO2 injection and migration, including data denoising, event detection, event location, magnitude estimation, moment tensor inversion, and stress field inversion. We detected and located two shallow clusters, which occurred during increasing injection pressure. The two shallow clusters were also featured by large b values and tensile cracking moment tensors that are obtained based on a newly developed moment tensor inversion method using single-borehole data. The inverted stress fields at the two clusters showed large deviations from the regional stress field. The results provide evidence for microseismic responses to CO2/fluid injection and migration.

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