Earthquake Growth Inhibited at Higher Coulomb Stress Change Rate at Groningen
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
© 2024. The Author(s).
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)
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Additional details
- National Science Foundation
- RISE-1822214
- National Science Foundation
- DGE-2139433
- Swiss National Science Foundation
- P2ELP2_195127
- Accepted
-
2024-10-04Accepted
- Available
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2024-10-15Version of Record online
- Caltech groups
- Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, Center for Geomechanics and Mitigation of Geohazards (GMG), Seismological Laboratory
- Publication Status
- Published