Geothermal Monitoring

The geothermal industry is driven by fluid injection, and there is a long history of geothermal energy systems inducing small earthquakes (e.g., Basel and St Gallen in Switzerland and Geysers in California). The two projects in Switzerland are both geothermal energy projects that were using hydraulic stimulation to increase the permeability of the fracture systems in the well and are known as Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS).

In most cases, induced seismicity from EGS or geothermal plants is mostly a nuisance and rarely causes damage. That all changed in 2017 (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04963-y) when a large (ML 5.8) damaging earthquake occurred in Pohang, South Korea, due to an EGS stimulation. For this reason, DOE has several industry best practices with respect to monitoring and assessing the hazard from induced seismicity (see this link: https://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/pdfs/geothermal_seismicity_protocol_012012.pdf) and operators of geothermal energy plants should be following this protocol.

ISTI is very familiar with these protocols and provides a traffic light system for our monitoring services in this industry (hydraulic fracture well completion seismic monitoring). ISTI has been working with monitoring induced seismicity for the geothermal industry for many years and for several customers. In some cases, we have provided turnkey networks for monitoring operations using our hardware. In others, we have taken over the data management from existing seismic networks operating around geothermal plants.

We use our advanced processing techniques developed from our hydraulic fracture monitoring systems to provide detailed information about the seismic events occurring at or around geothermal operators’ facilities. In addition, ISTI specializes in performing detailed analysis on existing data sets for the geothermal industry.