Scaling of seismicity induced by nonlinear fluid-rock interaction after an injection stop

Abstract

Fluid injections into unconventional reservoirs, performed for fluid-mobility enhancement, are accompanied by microseismic activity also after the injection. Previous studies revealed that the triggering of seismic events can be effectively described by nonlinear diffusion of pore fluid pressure perturbations where the hydraulic diffusivity becomes pressure dependent. The spatiotemporal distribution of postinjection-induced microseismicity has two important features: the triggering front, corresponding to early and distant events, and the back front, representing the time-dependent spatial envelope of the growing seismic quiescence zone. Here for the first time, we describe analytically the temporal behavior of these two fronts after the injection stop in the case of nonlinear pore fluid pressure diffusion. We propose a scaling law for the fronts and show that they are sensitive to the degree of nonlinearity and to the Euclidean dimension of the dominant growth of seismicity clouds. To validate the theoretical finding, we numerically model nonlinear pore fluid pressure diffusion and generate synthetic catalogs of seismicity. Additionally, we apply the new scaling relation to several case studies of injection-induced seismicity. The derived scaling laws describe well synthetic and real data.