First World Congress of International Consortium on Geo-disaster Reduction (1st ICGdR World Congress)

Injecting fluid into subsurface strata has the potential to cause earthquakes by altering pore pressure and subsurface stress. To assess the seismic hazard associated with subsurface flow processes, it is necessary to understand the underlying mechanics of fluid-induced fault reactivation. In this study, we conduct a coupled hydro-mechanical modeling of fluid injection into a fault with rate-and-state friction. We account for the fluid flow across and along the fault, as well as the hydromechanical properties of faults in the normal and tangential directions. We model the injection-induced slip of a fault, and the simulation results indicate that there are two primary factors that affect injection-induced seismicity. The first factor is that the initiation of rupture is directly related to the diffusion of pore pressure in the near field where there is high shear stress and a large reduction in fault strength due to the significant pressure change. The second factor is that the transfer of shear stress from the nucleation zone promotes the advancement of the slip front to the near- and far field. Our results are quite conservative since the model chose as the relevant pressure when calculating the effective normal stressand the shear stress has a slight effect on the pressure variation. Finally, the sensitivity analysis indicates that greater tangential permeability values delay the onset of fault rupture and diminish the likelihood of fault reactivation. Higher stiffness induces fault slip earlier but reduces its magnitude.

CO2 storage,Discontinuous Galerkin FEM,State-rate friction,Fault reactivation