Earthquakes continued after oil and gas recovery linked to COVID-19 was shut down

When hydraulic fracturing was halted last spring in the Kiskatinau region of British Columbia, researchers expected a seismic lull in the area. Instead, hundreds of small earthquakes occurred months after operations stopped, according to a new study.

In her presentation at the 2021 SSA Annual Meeting, Rebecca Salvage of the University of Calgary said that about 65% of these events cannot be attributed to natural earthquakes or the active injection of fluid from hydraulic fracturing processes.

Instead, Salvej and colleagues suggest that latent earthquakes may be the result of seismic slip, driven by fluid from previous hydraulic fracture injections that keep the rock’s pore pressure elevated.

Salvage explained that “because there are so many defects in that area, the fluid becomes trapped in these areas.” “And where the seismic deformation occurs, which leads to a very, very slow slide in these regions, then you get the earthquakes resulting from that process.”

The study by Salvage and her University of Calgary colleague David Eaton provides an unusual glimpse into how hydraulic fracturing may alter the rate of earthquakes in an area long after active processes have ceased.

Salvej said their findings may reflect a new rate of earthquakes in the region, however, “ but since this is an unprecedented situation, we have no idea if this is the case, and we will not know until the Kiskatinaw seismic and mitigation (KSMMA) hydraulic fracturing stops In full, which is unlikely to happen anytime in the near future. ”

Hydraulic fracturing is thought to be the main cause of seismic activity in the Kiskatinau region, causing thousands of small earthquakes over the past two decades. The region, along with most of western Canada, has very few natural earthquakes. Between 1984 and 2008, prior to oil and gas operations in the area, seismologists detected only 20 earthquakes in the Kiskatinau region, according to Salvej.

Researchers had just finished installing a new seismic cluster at KSMMA in January 2020, hoping to learn more about how active processes relate to earthquakes, particularly those of very small magnitudes.

Salvej said that the operators in the area had their own private small arrays, “but the general sensors in the area were sparse and scattered.” “We installed this matrix thinking, that’s gonna be cool, and we’re gonna pick up all this hydraulic fracturing.”

But when COVID-19 reached the region, operations were halted due to the government shutdown which caused oil and gas prices to plummet.

Then the researchers noticed that things weren’t completely calm. Between April and August 2020, they detected 389 earthquakes during a period of virtually no hydraulic fracturing. All of the earthquakes were of magnitude 1.2 or less, Salvage said, “so it would not be noticeable to anyone that the seismic background had increased without the seismologist analyzing.”

According to the researchers, earthquakes did not fall into the same patterns expected from earthquakes caused by hydraulic fracturing. The rate of earthquakes continued over time, rather than decreasing, and there was no pattern of earthquakes moving away from the initial source, as is often observed during the active injection of fluid.

Salvage said hydraulic fracturing has resumed in the area, along with an increase in earthquakes.

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