Potential influence of overpressurized gas on the induced seismicity in the St. Gallen deep geothermal project (Switzerland)

Abstract

Abstract. In July 2013, the city of St. Gallen conducted a deep geothermal project that aimed to exploit energy for district heating and generating power. A few days after an injection test and two acid stimulations that caused only minor seismicity, a gas kick forced the operators to inject drilling mud to combat the kick. Subsequently, multiple earthquakes were induced on a fault several hundred meters away from the well, including a ML 3.5 event that was felt throughout the nearby population centers. Given the occurrence of a gas kick and a felt seismic sequence with low total injected fluid volumes (~ 1200 m3), the St. Gallen deep geothermal project represents a particularly interesting case study of induced seismicity. Here, we first present a conceptual model based on seismic, borehole and seismological data suggesting a hydraulic connection between the well and the fault. The overpressurized gas, which is assumed to be initially sealed by the fault, may have been released due to the stimulations before entering the well via the hydraulic connection. We test this hypothesis with a numerical model calibrated against the borehole pressure of the injection test. We successfully reproduce the gas kick and the temporal and spatial characteristics of the main seismicity sequence that followed the well control operation. The results indicate that the gas may have destabilized the fault during and after the injection operations and could have enhanced the resulting seismicity. This study may have important implications for future deep hydrothermal projects conducted in similar geological conditions.

Hydraulic Transport Through Calcite Bearing Faults With Customized Roughness: Effects of Normal and Shear Loading

“…A too low subsurface production flow rate results in economic losses while too high flow rates can lead to fluid leak off and reactivation of faults located far from the injection wells. The latter was probably the case of the St. Gallen geothermal project (Zbinden et al, 2019) and possibly of several other injection induced seismicity cases (Ellsworth, 2013;Goebel & Brodsky, 2018;Grigoli et al, 2017;Kim et al, 2018;Lengliné et al, 2014;Yeck et al, 2016). The poorly estimated flow rates partly arise due to the difficulties in detecting the fracture networks in the underground and partly due to the difficulties of estimating fluid flow through rough fractures with complex surface topographies, submitted to large stresses.…”