Induced Seismicity Monitoring

Automated Seismics provides induced seismicity monitoring services using our AS-Monitor real-time seismic data acquisition system. We deliver live seismic event catalogs with excellent reliability and at significantly lower cost than traditional systems.  Whatever your application, our team of engineers and geophysicists customizes solutions to meet your needs.

Applications

Fluid injection into a reservoir triggering induced seismicity along a fault.

In any application where fluids are injected into a subsurface reservoir, tiny earthquakes are induced from slip on faults and fractures.  Monitoring induced seismicity is used to evaluate the risk of larger, more damaging earthquakes, but it is also highly valuable to characterize fluid injection into a reservoir.  Reasons to monitor induced seismicity include:

  • Risk assessment: By detecting more small-magnitude events, the likelihood and rate of larger, potentially hazardous earthquakes can be estimated. 

  • Mapping Subsurface Structures: Pinpoint active faults, fractures, and fluid flow pathways to guide safe and efficient operations. 

  • Reservoir Management: Understand the reservoir stress state to improve stimulation efficiency and reduce uncertainty. 

  • Regulatory Compliance: Meet traffic-light protocol (TLP) requirements for safe injection operations and provide auditable seismic records.

  • Public Trust: Demonstrate proactive monitoring and risk management to regulators and local communities.

Example use cases throughout the energy industry include:

  • Hydraulic fracturing/unconventional oil and gas

  • Enhanced geothermal systems

  • Wastewater injection

  • Carbon sequestration

  • Enhanced oil recovery

  • Mining

Data Acquisition

  • Design and Modeling: Based on the unique conditions on site, we design a layout of sensors to detect induced seismicity and conduct modeling to confirm it meets project objectives like magnitude threshold and area coverage. 

  • Geophone Sensors: High sensitivity three-component (3C) geophones record seismic data.  Depending on site conditions, geophones may be buried, connected in strings, or deployed in shallow boreholes to increase signal-to-noise ratio. 

  • Wireless Nodes: Solar-powered nodes on the surface record data from geophones and transmit via Wi-Fi to a central base station located on site. Data is then relayed via cellular, landline, or Starlink internet links to our servers.

Nodes for recording seismic data.

Base station for collecting data from nodes over Wi-Fi.

Web dashboard for visualizing data such as location map, event catalog, magnitude distribution, and raw waveforms.

Processing

  • Event Detection: Data is processed at our servers where arrival times of seismic waves are picked by a machine learning algorithm in real time and clustered into events. 

  • Location: Event location and origin time are computed from picked arrival times and stored in a catalog.  To accurately locate events, local seismic velocity models can be integrated and improved with travel time tomography.   

  • Magnitude Estimation: Based on the strength of recorded signals, earthquake magnitude is computed.  Earthquakes from public catalogs or nearby well perforation shots can be used to calibrate event magnitudes.

  • Web Dashboard: All information about detected events is available on a secure web dashboard, which is updated in real time as new events are detected.  Downloadable catalogs, raw waveforms, event location maps, and magnitude distributions are available for visualization, quality control, and interpretation. 

  • Alerts: For hazard mitigation or when traffic light protocols are in effect, alerts are immediately sent via SMS and/or email for earthquakes occurring above a selectable magnitude threshold in a region at your site.

Advantages

Comparison of a M=0.7 earthquake recorded by a broadband seismometer (top row) co-located with our high sensitivity geophones (bottom 4 rows).

  • Cost-effectiveness: Our nodes integrate data logging, Wi-Fi telemetry, and solar power into a compact, power-efficient package much more affordable than other permanent seismic stations on the market.   Our high sensitivity 3C geophones produce data equivalent to broadband seismometers at a fraction of the cost. 

  • Risk Reduction: Surface nodes avoid the risks of deployment in harsh borehole conditions and are readily serviced when issues occur.  With real-time feedback, we quickly identify and repair faults as they occur. 

  • Reliability: For high value operations where uptime is paramount, we offer surplus nodes or duplexed telemetry from each sensor location to ensure uninterrupted monitoring.  We also offer redundant internet links to ensure data is relayed to servers for processing. 

  • Quality Assurance: To achieve accurate results, we deploy our instruments at institutional test sites and benchmark data against public sources. 

  • Scalability: Depending on your budget and desired detection sensitivity, we can deploy a sparse array of nodes or scale up to a denser array with 100+ nodes to detect microseismic events with lower signal-to-noise ratio. 

  • Ongoing Support: Our team provides installation, maintenance, troubleshooting, and upgrades throughout monitoring.  On-call geophysicists are available to verify event alerts during critical operations.