Elastic stress transfer as a diffusive process due to aseismic fault slip in response to fluid injection

Abstract:

Subsurface fluid injection is often followed by observations of an enlarging cloud of microseismicity. The cloud’s diffusive growth is thought to be a direct response to the diffusion of elevated pore fluid pressure reaching pre-stressed faults, triggering small instabilities; the observed high rates of this growth are interpreted to reflect a relatively high permeability of a fractured subsurface [e.g., Shapiro, GJI 1997].

We investigate an alternative mechanism for growing a microseismic cloud: the elastic transfer of stress due to slow, aseismic slip on a subset of the pre-existing faults in this damaged subsurface. We show that the growth of the slipping region of the fault may be self-similar in a diffusive manner. While this slip is driven by fluid injection, we show that, for critically stressed faults, the apparent diffusion of this slow slip may quickly exceed the poroelastically driven diffusion of the elevated pore fluid pressure. Under these conditions, microseismicity can be first triggered by the off-fault stress perturbation due to the expanding region of slip on principal faults. This provides an alternative interpretation of diffusive growth rates in terms of the subsurface stress state rather than an enhanced hydraulic diffusivity. That such aseismic slip may occur, outpace fluid diffusion, and in turn trigger microseismic events, is also suggested by on- and near-fault observations in past and recently reported fluid injection experiments [e.g., Cornet et al., PAGEOPH 1997; Guglielmi et al., Science 2015].

The model of injection-induced slip assumes elastic off-fault behavior and a fault strength determined by the product of a constant friction coefficient and the local effective normal stress. The sliding region is enlarged by the pore pressure increase resolved on the fault plane. Remarkably, the rate of self-similar expansion may be determined by a single parameter reflecting both the initial stress state and the magnitude of the pore pressure increase.