Benchmark of Surface Microseismic Monitoring at Peace River, Canada

We acquired at Peace River a suite of geophysical data including 3 months of passive seismic. A surface array of buried multi-component receivers covering an area of about 2Km^2 listened to the recovery activity, which is driven by steam injection at a depth around 550m below the surface, with the intention of detecting induced microseismic events. To support this information, a series of string shots were detonated in a well near the center of the survey area and recorded by the same receiver array. We benchmarked the localization results of two service companies against an in-house quality control processing based on a cross-correlation migration approach. From the analysis, we found that: (1) the minimum detectable moment magnitude by the surface array seems to be around –1.6; (2) the catalogues provided by the service companies differ greatly, and contain a significant number of events that appear not to be associated with the activity ongoing at the reservoir; (3) the events categorized as microseisms are located near the heel of a well that was injecting steam at the time of the survey; (4) the differences in location of string shots and microseismic events between our and the companies’ processing are less than 100m.