GST May Presentation

Thursday May 9th  -   Baxter's Interurban Grill Event

11:30 Lunch

12:00 Presentation

        Online link  https://meet.google.com/caz-ycax-mas

Title:   

How understanding deep pressure communication has driven successful seismicity mitigation in Culberson Co., Delaware Basin

ABSTRACT:

The Delaware Basin has seen significant induced seismicity over the last few years. Much of the seismicity in Reeves County has been attributed to shallow injection and hydraulic fracturing. The deeper seismicity observed in the Western part of the Basin has been harder to explain. There have been a number of events over 5.0 ML including a 5.0 ML event in 2020 that was attributed to the closest deep disposal well. However, many of the significant events are far from any injection activities and some of the earliest seismicity observed on a proprietary array in 2017, occurred at what are distal extremes of the current seismicity trend. Most regional pore pressure models fail to predict any influence at these greater distances. We have installed gauges and monitored the reservoir pressure in several our deep SWDs. These observations have led to a simple model of pore pressure diffusion that does an excellent job of correlating injection volumes to observed pressure changes. It also predicts a much larger radius of influence that explains the distal seismicity swarms. For the deep Delaware basin, high quality observations of reservoir pore pressure over time have proven to be significantly more valuable than complex modeling with poor constraint. This has led to coordinated operator response that is driving a decrease in seismicity across the Basin.

BIOGRAPHY:

Jamie Rich is an exploration geophysicist for Coterra Energy (formerly Cimarex) where he works in their technology and innovation group. His current role focuses on a variety of geophysical methods but most of his time recently is spent on induced seismicity and fiber optic monitoring. Prior to Coterra, he was employed by Devon Energy where he spent time working in multiple business units as well as their geophysical technology group. He spent three years on the faculty at the University of Oklahoma where his teaching and research focused on passive seismic and 3D seismic attributes. He is active in the Geophysical society of Tulsa (GST) were he currently serves as the SEG council representative for GST. He is a member of SPE and SEG and served as associate editor for passive seismic in the Journal Geophysics from 2012-2018. He earned his MS and PhD from the University of Oklahoma in Geophysics and his BS in both Applied Physics and Anthropology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.