Published October 28, 2024 | Published
Journal Article Open

Earthquake Growth Inhibited at Higher Coulomb Stress Change Rate at Groningen

  • 1. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 2. ROR icon Shell (Netherlands)

Abstract

Gas extraction from the Groningen gas field resulted in significant induced seismicity. We analyze the magnitude‐frequency distribution of these earthquakes in space, time and in view of stress changes calculated based on gas production and reservoir properties. Previous studies suggested variations related to reservoir geometry and stress. While we confirm the spatial variations, we do not detect a clear sensitivity of b‐value to Coulomb stress changes. However, we find that b‐value correlates positively with the rate of Coulomb stress changes. This correlation is statistically significant and robust to uncertainties related to stress change calculation. This study thus points to a possible influence of stress change rate on the probability of the magnitude of induced earthquakes.

Copyright and License

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acknowledgement

We thank Krittanon (Pond) Sirorattanakul, Hojjat Kaveh, Linxuan Li, Kyungjae (KJ) Im, Nicholas van der Elst, Thomas Goebel, and Bernard Dost for their help and comments. This study was supported by the NSF/Industry-University Collaborative Research Center ’Geomechanics and Mitigation of Geohazards' (National Science Foundation award 1822214) and the Enhancement Project GMG-3 funded by NAM. Y.T. acknowledges funding from the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (National Science Foundation Grant 2139433). M.A. acknowledges funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation through Grant P2ELP2_195127.

Data Availability

The data and codes necessary for this paper's analyses are available online at Tamama et al. (2024).

Supplemental Material

Supporting information (PDF)

Files

Geophysical Research Letters - 2024 - Tamama - Earthquake Growth Inhibited at Higher Coulomb Stress Change Rate at.pdf

Additional details

Created:
January 7, 2025
Modified:
January 9, 2025