Verification of Network Design for Induced Seismicity

Induced seismicity monitoring for hydrocarbon or geothermal energy extraction is usually designed to meet political or environmental goals and limitation (e.g. UK limitations on magnitude of completeness thresholds). Therefore operators seek monitoring network designs to meet or exceed these goal or limitations. Generally, before starting any microseismic monitoring the geometry of array has to be designed to achieve optimal performance of the network and to fulfil all demands for obtaining of the required data quality. Design of the monitoring array should follow several rules. For surface monitoring networks, a proper detection and location of events requires station spacing approximately twice as large as the expected depth of the seismic events. In addition, seismic noise in some area may significantly decrease the monitoring network performance. Last but not least the monitoring network performance is dependent on the assumed velocity and attenuation models. All of these factors significantly affect the network performance and it is a challenge to verify that the proposed performance is going to be real. Additionally, network performance in seismically quiet areas is particularly challenging as there is no seismicity to benchmark it on before the start of the operations (e.g. Gaucher, 2016).