Title:

International Cooperation to Address Induced Seismicity in Geothermal Systems

Authors:

Roy Baria, Ernest Majer, Mike Fehler, Nafi Toksoz, Chris Bromley, Dimitra Teza

Conference:

Stanford Geothermal Workshop

Year:

2006

Session:

Introduction

Language:

English

Paper Number:

Baria2

File Size:

34KB

View File:

Abstract:

As the global demand for energy increases it is becoming apparent that geothermal must and will play a significant part in meeting this demand. Exploitation of deep resources such as geothermal, mining, hydrocarbon etc. will need manipulation of the deep geological setting to release the economic resource. Seismic events may be generated during the extraction or the manipulation of the economic resource. One of the environmental as well as scientific issues that will need to be addressed is the effect and the role of seismicity in the management of geothermal resources. The generation of induced felt seismic events with a magnitude 2 and above may cause concern among the local residents. In particular, the general public's perception is that this induced seismicity may cause damage to structures on the surface, similar to that caused by "natural" earthquakes.

It is thought that not enough resources have been invested in trying to answer some of the questions associated with felt induced seismic events. For example, how and why do they occur, can we devise any procedures to reduce them, what are the extraneous conditions which causes such a hazard to exist, etc. It is accepted that a large amount of knowledge and experience exits and this needs to be synthesized. The IEA/GIA1 participants recognized this problem and therefore the topic of induced seismicity was added as one of the tasks in an Annex. The outcome of this was to hold an initial workshop in February 2005 after the reservoir-engineering meeting in Stanford. The objective of the workshop was to leverage resources and knowledge to define a path forward. The workshop is intended to be an interactive exercise with all contributing in one fashion or another, i.e., a true workshop not a string of presentations.

The goal of this workshop was to assemble an international group of scientists, inform them of the problem, seek their view on various aspects and prioritize issues for addressing induced felt seismic events.

The initial workshop produced interesting concepts on the triggering mechanisms for felt induced events, an industrial perspective of the benefit of the induced events, available techniques to characterize them, mechanisms on how they are generated, the effect of stress and geology etc. The conclusion of this workshop was to form an international collaborative effort, which will share the available data, process the data, plan joint experiments and share the results. The participants requested a second workshop after the 2005 GRC meeting in Reno, Nevada.

The home page was established at LBNL and this was reported at the second workshop in Reno. The data storage format, available data, and task sharing was discussed. Documentation is under preparation to define the current state of the understanding and possible ways forward. One of the key outcomes was to treat geothermal sites as civil engineering/mining projects and define the felt induced events as a part of civil engineering/mining hazard by defining the felt events in term of ground velocity and dominant frequency.


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