Identifying Seismic Risk in the Appalachian Basin Geothermal Play Fairway Analysis Project Using Potential Fields, Seismicity, and the World Stress Map

Abstract:

A collaborative effort between Cornell University, Southern Methodist University, and West Virginia University has been sponsored by the US Department Of Energy to perform a Geothermal Play Fairway Analysis of the low temperature direct use potential for portions of the Appalachian sedimentary basin in New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia - abbreviated here as GPFA-AB.

One risk factor - of several being analyzed for the GPFA-AB - is whether a candidate location is near an active fault, and thereby potentially susceptible to induced seismicity from geothermal operations. Existing fault maps do not share the GPFA-AB boundaries or scale. Hence, their use leads to problems of uneven coverage, varying interpretation of faults vs. lineaments, and different mapping scales. For more uniformity across the GPFA-AB region, we use an analysis of gravity and magnetic fields.

Multiscale edge Poisson wavelet analyses of potential fields ("worms") have a physical interpretation as the locations of lateral boundaries in a source distribution that exactly generates the observed field. Not all worms are faults, and of faults, only a subset might be active. Also, worms are only sensitive to steeply dipping structures.

To identify some active structures, we plot worms and intra-plate earthquakes from the ISC, NEIC, and EarthScope TA catalogs. Worms within a small distance of epicenters are tracked spatially. To within errors in location, this is a sufficient condition to identify structures that might be active faults - which we categorize with higher risk than other structures.

Plotting worms within World Stress Map σ₁ directions yields an alternative approach to identifying activatable structures. Here, we use worms to identify structures with strikes favorably oriented for failure by Byerlee's law. While this is a necessary criterion for fault activation it is not a sufficient one - because we lack detailed information about stress magnitudes throughout the GPFA-AB region.

Details from both approaches and their resulting GPFA-AB risk maps will be presented at the meeting.