Earthquake sensitivity of faults associated with wastewater injection in the Fort Worth Basin, Texas

What is it about?

The rate of earthquakes in the hydrocarbon‐producing Fort Worth Basin of north‐central Texas, which underlies the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area, increased markedly from 2008 through 2015, coinciding spatiotemporally with injection of 2 billion barrels of wastewater into deep aquifers. Here, we present detailed new models of potentially seismogenic faults and the stress field, which we use to build a probabilistic assessment of fault‐slip potential.

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Photo by Andrew Buchanan on Unsplash

Photo by Andrew Buchanan on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Based on these new data, our probabilistic analysis shows that a majority of the total trace length of the mapped faults have slip potential that is equal to or higher than that of the faults that have already hosted injection‐induced earthquake sequences. We conclude that most faults under the Fort Worth Basin are highly sensitive to reactivation, and we postulate that many faults are still unidentified. Ongoing injection operations in the region should be conducted with these understandings in mind.