During a seismic monitoring of hydraulic fracturing treatment, it is very common to ignore the deviations of the monitoring and treatment wells from their assumed positions. This can lead to significant errors in the observed azimuth and other parameters of the monitored fracture-system geometry derived from microseismic event locations. For common hydraulic fracturing geometries, a 2° deviation uncertainty on the positions of the monitoring or treatment well survey can cause more than a 20° uncertainty of the inverted fracture azimuths. Furthermore, if the positions of both the injection point and the receiver array are not known accurately and the velocity model is adjusted to locate perforations on the assumed positions, several-millisecond discrepancies between measured and modelled SH-P traveltime differences may appear along the receiver array. These traveltime discrepancies may then be misinterpreted as an effect of anisotropy, and the use of such anisotropic model may lead to the mislocation of the detected fracture system. The uncertainty of the relative positions between the monitoring and treatment wells can have a cumulative, nonlinear effect on inverted fracture parameters. We show that incorporation of borehole deviation surveys allows reasonably accurate positioning of the microseismic events.
The reprint is available in PDF (2 021 kB !).
SW3D
- main page of consortium Seismic Waves in Complex 3-D Structures .