Integration of geomechanical modeling with induced seismic source mechanisms to assess deformation and stress changes

The recording of induced seismicity plays a significant role in monitoring geo-industrial activities in terms of providing improved understanding of the failure mechanisms and as well as quantitative tool for risk assessment. The induced seismicity is due to local perturbations to the in situ stress field from such industrial activities. Significant work is being directed at developing fracture models that enable the assessment of local deformation and stress evolution due to stimulation design. Passive seismic monitoring provides an additional data source to study the stress field evolution by imaging the in situ response of the rock mass over and characterizing the failure mechanisms and high-order inelastic response of the rock mass. We integrate microseismic data with a geomechanical model to quantify deformation and stress field evolution. Our approach utilizes moment tensor solutions to represent localized discrete rupture zones. The geomechanical algorithm evaluates the Green’s functions for each rupture, and subsequently calculates the co- and post-seismic deformation using linear superposition. We perform this work flow on a passive seismic dataset to validate the technique as well as provide insight into the observed seismicity response due to a large (~M5) event.