The relationship between seismicity and wastewater injection in Johnson County, TX

Abstract:

In light of recent research that suggests some high-rate wastewater injection wells from commercial oil and gas operations are casually linked to recent earthquakes in North Texas and Oklahoma, we apply a waveform cross-correlation technique to continuous waveform data from 38 seismic stations across Texas and Oklahoma using templates from 96 cataloged events from 2010-2015. We focus on an area near Venus TX, 40 km south of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area in Johnson County where a M4.0 earthquake was reported by the USGS on 7 May 2015. The epicenter was within several km of 4 high rate wells with max injection rates ranging between 684,000-833,000 barrels/month. Templates were chosen from the USGS and locally derived Venus aftershock sequence, events in the ANSS catalog with a minimum magnitude of 2 between 2009-2015, and previously located earthquakes recorded by USArray stations between 2009-2011. In Johnson County, there are 27 wastewater injection wells, each with a reported maximum injection rate of 104,000 barrels/month and greater. We detected 494 events within Johnson and adjacent counties, with approximately 36% of the detections occurring within 10 km of the Venus earthquake, spanning March 2010 to June 2015. Most of the seismicity occurs adjacent to higher rate injection wells, suggesting a link between monthly injection rate and earthquake occurrence. Template matching allows us to detect earthquakes otherwise too small to be picked up by routine earthquake identification methods and informs our research concerning the presence and spatial distribution of possibly induced, small magnitude earthquakes. We plan to apply this technique to detect seismicity that may have occurred prior to the start of wastewater injection or felt earthquakes.