COMPLAS 2023

Role of plasticity in induced seismicity and its mitigation

  • Zhao, Xiaoxi (University of Southern California)
  • Jha, Birendra (University of Southern California)

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Long-term withdrawal of fluids from subsurface reservoirs has led to permanent deformation and faulting in California's Central Valley, Nevada's Las Vegas Valley, Wilmington oilfield, and the Ekofisk oilfield. It remains a challenge to apply computational plasticity frameworks to consolidated reservoirs with multiple faults and aquifer-aquitard systems with cyclic recharge-discharge. This is important from the point of view of induced seismicity risk management because plastic failure can often precede fault slip and consume a part of the mechanical energy available to drive seismicity. This can alter the stress trajectory of a fault such that the onset, location, and magnitude of seismic events are different from those predicted by a poroelastic simulation. We will present insights from a modeling study of a European gas field, including its plan to inject gas to mitigate the production-induced seismicity risk. We aim to quantify the role of plasticity on the evolution of Coulomb stress on the fault during long-term fluid production and injection.