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| Titel |
Earthquakes and depleted gas reservoirs: which comes first? |
| VerfasserIn |
M. Mucciarelli, F. Donda, G. Valensise |
| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| ISSN |
1561-8633
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| Digitales Dokument |
URL |
| Erschienen |
In: Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences ; 15, no. 10 ; Nr. 15, no. 10 (2015-10-07), S.2201-2208 |
| Datensatznummer |
250119712
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 copernicus.org/nhess-15-2201-2015.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| While scientists are paying increasing attention to the seismicity
potentially induced by hydrocarbon exploitation, so far, little is known
about the reverse problem, i.e. the impact of active faulting and
earthquakes on hydrocarbon reservoirs. The 20 and 29 May 2012 earthquakes in
Emilia, northern Italy (Mw 6.1 and 6.0), raised concerns among the public
for being possibly human-induced, but also shed light on the possible use of
gas wells as a marker of the seismogenic potential of an active
fold and thrust belt. We compared the location, depth and production history
of 455 gas wells drilled along the Ferrara-Romagna arc, a large hydrocarbon
reserve in the southeastern Po Plain (northern Italy), with the location of
the inferred surface projection of the causative faults of the 2012 Emilia
earthquakes and of two pre-instrumental damaging earthquakes. We found that
these earthquake sources fall within a cluster of sterile wells, surrounded
by productive wells at a few kilometres' distance. Since the geology of the
productive and sterile areas is quite similar, we suggest that past
earthquakes caused the loss of all natural gas from the potential reservoirs
lying above their causative faults. To validate our hypothesis we performed
two different statistical tests (binomial and Monte Carlo) on the relative
distribution of productive and sterile wells, with respect to seismogenic
faults. Our findings have important practical implications: (1) they may
allow major seismogenic sources to be singled out within large active thrust
systems; (2) they suggest that reservoirs hosted in smaller anticlines are
more likely to be intact; and (3) they also suggest that in order to
minimize the hazard of triggering significant earthquakes, all new gas
storage facilities should use exploited reservoirs rather than sterile
hydrocarbon traps or aquifers. |
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