Relation of south-east Tatarstan's seismicity to the Almetyevskaya area's oil field development parameters

Abstract

© 2020 International Multidisciplinary Scientific Geoconference. All rights reserved. In the past few decades it has been evident that various human activities can induce local seismic activity. One of the important factors of human induced seismicity is hydrocarbon fields' development [6], [12]. One of the regions with probable induced seismicity is Tatarstan Republic where a giant Romashkino oilfield has been produced for a several decades. The link between seismicity and hydrocarbon production for this area was previously studied [1]. In this study the attempt has been made to find possible reflection of seismicity's intensity of South-East of Tatarstan in the development parameters of Almetyevskaya area which is situated in the most seismically active locality of Tatarstan's oil production zone. Seismic events in the region were located and characterized by a local seismic-monitoring network of Tatneft oil company and recorded in seismic catalogs. Each event has its time, coordinates, and magnitude on Richter scale and Soviet Energy K-class scale. We used these magnitudes as well as short-time average and long-time average of K-scale magnitude as indicators of seismicity's intensity of South-East of Tatarstan. The variations of these indicators have been compared with variations of such Almetyevskaya area's field development parameters as oil production, fluid production, water injection, water cut, average bottom hole pressure, number of active injectors and number of active producers. The corresponding correlation coefficients were calculated. It became evident that when doing a sufficient averaging, some trends start to emerge. The main ones found in this study is noticeable correlation between long-time average of K-class magnitude and oil production, and number of water injectors.