Grant: Idea to Innovation

Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have dramatically changed the energy landscape in North America;shale plays that were previously deemed uneconomic are now developed extensively. Hydraulic fracturingcreates new fractures or pops open existing ones, improving fluid flow and thus reservoir drainage. Local rockfailure or slip yields an acoustic emission, which is also known as a microseismic event. Microseismicmonitoring during hydraulic fracturing is a common surveillance technology to record real-time information onin situ rock deformation and failure in order to ensure safe and effective hydraulic fracturing operations.Event localization plays an important role in microseismic monitoring. Reverse-time extrapolation is apowerful full-waveform imaging technique that takes recorded wavefields, reverses the time axis and thenback-propagates the observed data to the original source locations. The procedure is analogous to playing amovie back in time to see how it all started. The technique has proven very robust for imaging subsurfacegeology using reflection seismic data but it is only rarely applied to microseismic data because itscomputational demands render real-time imaging highly challenging.Model-order reduction can accelerate online computations by orders of magnitude, leading to faster imagingsolutions, strongly reduced needs for significant computation power in the field, as well as automated results,thus reducing manual labor. The new technology thus promises cost savings on both labor and hardwarerequirements in the field. This project will evaluate the commercial viability of the technology for real-timemicroseismic monitoring. A Canadian patent application on the use of reduced-order systems for microseismicevent localization has already been filed.