Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has partnered with another national lab and a seismic instrumentation monitoring company to develop a physics-based seismic-forecasting software platform to help operators and regulators better understand and manage seismic hazards at carbon storage sites.
LLNL scientists have worked with researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and Ottawa, Canada-based Nanometrics, Inc. to develop the Operation FoRecasting Of Induced Seismicity (ORION) toolkit, an open-source software platform.
Commercial-scale carbon-storage operations face significant risk of inducing seismicity when fluids are disposed of in the Earth’s subsurface. Induced earthquakes, or seismic events generated by anthropogenic activities, may damage property and threaten the integrity of shallower sealing units, allowing carbon dioxide, or CO2, to escape.
While most operations will experience low-level tremors, it is possible that larger-magnitude earthquakes may occur. Such events can lead to interruption of CO2 injection at a single storage site or erode confidence in the entire industry. To manage these risks, individual operators must understand both the current and future seismic hazards at a storage site and regulators must be able to evaluate the seismic hazard on the basin-scale.
