Nowcasting Induced Seismicity at the Groningen gas field in the Netherlands

Molly Luginbuhl, John B. Rundle, & Donald L. Turcotte

Published August 15, 2018, SCEC Contribution #8651, 2018 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #034

The Groningen gas field in the Netherlands is one of the most productive gas fields in Europe. Production began in 1963 and in 1991 the area experienced their first induced earthquake. Since then there has been a significant level of induced seismicity; this seismicity is attributed to fluid withdrawal not fluid injection. The largest induced earthquake was a magnitude 3.6 in 2012, which caused thousands of damage claims and led to a reduction in gas production in January 2014. In this project, we utilize truncated Gutenberg-Richter frequency-magnitude scaling to introduce a possible maximum earthquake with M = 3.85. We also demonstrate an almost complete absence of aftershocks following the largest induced earthquakes. To quantify the temporal evolution of the induced seismicity we perform our nowcasting method. Nowcasting uses the catalog of seismicity in the region. The method utilizes the number of small earthquakes that occur between pairs of large earthquakes. A major advantage of nowcasting is that it relies on "natural time", earthquake counts, between events rather than clock time. Thus, the results are applicable to induced seismicity that varies in time. We count the rate of occurrence of small induced earthquakes to nowcast the probability of occurrence of larger earthquakes.

Key Words
induced seismicity, nowcasting, natural time, Groningen

Citation
Luginbuhl, M., Rundle, J. B., & Turcotte, D. L. (2018, 08). Nowcasting Induced Seismicity at the Groningen gas field in the Netherlands . Poster Presentation at 2018 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Earthquake Forecasting and Predictability (EFP)