Fluid injection fault reactivation experiments in the field and the lab
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Quinn Wenning
Bedretto Underground Laboratory, ETH Zurich
- Date & Time
- Location
- Online-only seminar via Microsoft Teams
- Host
- David Lockner
- Summary
Natural earthquakes and those induced by industrial-scale geoengineering provide us scientists with a multitude of scientific questions that beg answering. Often we look to lab-bench-scale experiments to gain insight to the physical processes that govern the subsurface. This setting allows us to precisely control the temperature and stress conditions, but do not capture field-scale heterogeneities. Doing experiments in nature or at the industrial-scale are often not feasible or economic. So, we have turned to intermediate-scale underground laboratories to bridge the gap. Such labs enable scientists and engineers to study natural processes with the practical and economic benefit of surrounding a smaller heterogeneous target volume (10 m3 to 100 m3) with a dense array of sensors (you name it, we try it), while still having a precise control on the natural conditions and volumes/rates/chemistry of fluids that we inject or produce. This presentation shows examples of how we utilize the different scales to drive our understanding of subsurface fluid induced fault reactivation forward.