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Abstract

Some of the advantages of surface microseismic monitoring can be examined to suggest ways in which those advantages can improve the use and interpretation of microseismic results. In particular, surface microseismic monitoring provides an opportunity to determine the source mechanism for most events, and methods are available that can increase the confidence in those results. One method for determining microseismic source mechanism is imagedomain pattern recognition (IDPR), which is more suitable to the relatively noisy environment of surface microseismic monitoring than the classic time-domain methods are. One drawback that must be addressed is that accurate image-domain pattern recognition requires the use of 3D velocity corrections. Finally, microseismic events with high-confidence locations and source mechanisms can be used to directly construct discrete fracture networks (DFN).

A surface microseismic survey was conducted in a noisy suburban active oilfield environment. Unconventional patch acquisition survey design and careful processing allowed the extraction of over 8,000 events from the noisy data. Patch acquisition and multi-channel noise attenuation were critical components of the success of the project.