The State of Stress Beyond the Borehole

Abstract:

The state of stress controls all in-situ reservoir activities and yet we lack the quantitative means to measure it. This problem is important in light of the fact that the subsurface provides more than 80 percent of the energy used in the United States and serves as a reservoir for geological carbon sequestration, used fuel disposition, and nuclear waste storage. Adaptive control of subsurface fractures and fluid flow is a crosscutting challenge being addressed by the new Department of Energy SubTER Initiative that has the potential to transform subsurface energy production and waste storage strategies.

Our methodology to address the above mentioned matter is based on a novel Advance Multi-Physics Tomographic (AMT) approach for determining the state of stress, thereby facilitating our ability to monitor and control subsurface geomechanical processes. We developed the AMT algorithm for deriving state-of-stress from integrated density and seismic velocity models and demonstrate the feasibility by applying the AMT approach to synthetic data sets to assess accuracy and resolution of the method as a function of the quality and type of geophysical data. With this method we can produce regional- to basin-scale maps of the background state of stress and identify regions where stresses are changing. Our approach is based on our major advances in the joint inversion of gravity and seismic data to obtain the elastic properties for the subsurface; and coupling afterwards the output from this joint-inversion with theoretical model such that strain (and subsequently) stress can be computed. Ultimately we will obtain the differential state of stress over time to identify and monitor critically stressed faults and evolving regions within the reservoir, and relate them to anthropogenic activities such as fluid/gas injection.