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EGS Collab Experiment 1: Microseismic Monitoring

Metadata Updated: August 13, 2024

The U.S. Department of Energy's Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS) Collab project aims to improve our understanding of hydraulic stimulations in crystalline rock for enhanced geothermal energy production through execution of intensely monitored meso-scale experiments. The first experiment is being performed at the 4850 ft level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), approximately 1.5 km below the surface at Lead, South Dakota.

Here we report on microseismic monitoring of repeated stimulation experiments and subsequent flow tests between two boreholes in the Poorman Formation. Stimulations were performed at several locations in the designated injection borehole at flow rates from 0.1 to 5 L/min over temporal durations from minutes to hours. Microseismic monitoring was performed using a dense 3D sensor array including two cemented hydrophone strings with 12 sensors at 1.75 m spacing accompanied by 18 3-C accelerometers, deployed in 6 monitoring boreholes, completely surrounding the stimulation region. Continuous records were obtained over a two-month period using a novel dual recording system consisting of a conventional 96 channel exploration seismograph and a high-performance 64 channel digitizer sampling sensors at 4 and 100 kHz respectively.

Using a standard STA/LTA triggering algorithm, we detected thousands of microseismic events with recorded energy in a frequency range generally above 3 kHz and up to 40 kHz. The locations of these events are consistent with creation of a hydraulic fracture and additional reactivation of pre-existing structures. Using manual pick refinement and double-difference relocation we are able to track the fracture growth to high precision. We estimate the times and locations of the fracture intersecting a monitoring and the production borehole using microseismic events. They are in excellent agreement with independent measurements using distributed temperature sensing, in-situ strain observations and measurements of conductivity changes.

This submission includes a microearthquake catalog, raw event files, a subset of the continuous microseismic monitoring data collected during stimulations and flow test activity on 05/22/2018, 05/23/2018, 05/24/2018, 05/25/2018, 06/25/2018, 07/19/2018, 07/20/2018, 12/7/2018, 12/20/2018, and 12/21/2018 (in binary format), and a binary file interpreter to read the continuous microseismic monitoring data. A Stanford Geothermal Workshop paper is also included to describe microseismic monitoring activities at SURF during these periods.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: Creative Commons Attribution

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Dates

Metadata Created Date June 24, 2021
Metadata Updated Date August 13, 2024

Metadata Source

Harvested from OpenEI data.json

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date June 24, 2021
Metadata Updated Date August 13, 2024
Publisher Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Maintainer
Doi 10.15121/1557417
Identifier https://data.openei.org/submissions/3812
Data First Published 2019-07-29T06:00:00Z
Data Last Modified 2024-08-13T15:19:58Z
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 019:20
Metadata Context https://openei.org/data.json
Metadata Catalog ID https://openei.org/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Data Quality True
Harvest Object Id fd5eb756-42fd-43c8-b619-f29bd38bab91
Harvest Source Id 7cbf9085-0290-4e9f-bec1-91653baeddfd
Harvest Source Title OpenEI data.json
Homepage URL https://gdr.openei.org/submissions/1166
License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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Program Code 019:006
Projectlead Lauren Boyd
Projectnumber EE0032708
Projecttitle EGS Collab
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash f92e3792189ce0aec96726670cadfe44c47f8760716c073b01b118ff838fe25e
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