MicroSeismic, Inc. began with a mission to bring passive seismic technology to the oilfield. Our vision of areas to apply the technology included wellbore stability in tectonically active areas, monitoring of CO2 sequestration, enhanced geothermal systems, disposal wells, production, and reservoir stimulation. The shale gale that blew in during the mid 2000’s overwhelmed us with demand for our services and soon 99% of our business was frac monitoring. Today the priorities have changed and while frac monitoring is still a business driver for us, the opportunities are opening for us to revisit our original vision of practices to pursue. Importantly, the experience of the past nearly 20 years will allow us to perform projects in these other areas efficiently and effectively.
Our values.
Throughout the industry downturn over the past few years, MSI has never took a backward step on its core values. Which are to conduct our operations in the field and in the office in a safe, sustainable, and environmentally conscious manner. We use the best science we know to approach our clients’ problems and to conduct our practice with the highest level of integrity when dealing with our clients, employees and suppliers. We are emerging from this time of difficulty with a core employee group that is dedicated to all these values and who have been “tested by fire”. We are proud, for example, to note that we have worked more than 40 months and more than 2.25 million employee hours without a reportable lost time incident.
Our services.
Our expertise and experience allows us to apply passive seismic techniques across a wide spectrum of problems relevant to the oil field and beyond.
Frac-driven Interactions (FDI’s)
Unconventional field development has progressed to the point where the interaction between the closely spaced producers has been well documented. These interactions can result in all manner of effects ranging from temporary or even permanent loss of production in pre-existing wells, poor SRV development in new wells with a concurrent poor production performance, all the way to wellbore damage, even loss of adjacent wells. MSI can design a data acquisition strategy to properly monitor your frac’ing program. Our FracRx® analysis technology will guide decisions relating to spacing and treatment parameters. We can monitor in real-time to give early warning of FDI’s that could lead to suboptimal well performance, wellbore damage, or loss.
Induced Seismicity
Reservoir stimulation and wastewater disposal both result in a reduction in the tectonic stresses that usually keep the ubiquitous faults and fractures in the subsurface from moving. This is a well understood principle. As the stresses are reduced, small seismic events will almost always precede any larger events that might be felt at the surface. An early detection of such precursors allows for mitigation by simply turning down or ceasing injection until the stresses relax. MSI can design a data acquisition array customized to the specific injection project. The array will establish a baseline for naturally occurring seismicity prior to the startup of injection activities. Once injection begins, a real time monitoring will present an array of alarms at prescribed levels of detected seismicity allowing for timely intervention to reduce the earthquake hazard and protect the operator’s license to practice.
Sinkhole Detection
Damage to communities, homes, businesses, factories, and infrastructure from sinkholes results in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in repair and lost revenue charges every year. The spalling of material into a sinkhole as it grows results in acoustic emissions. These emissions are generally very small and not easily detected. However, MSI has proven in a real-world project that it can design an appropriate array that will allow for the early detection of developing sinkholes beneath your facility in a time frame that will permit intervention to mitigate the hazard before it becomes critical. We call this service KarstAlert®.
Carbon Capture and Storage
Critical to the concept of CO2 storage in underground reservoirs is that the reservoir seal remains intact. If pressures inside the reservoir become sufficiently high, there is the potential for the caprock to fracture and the gas to escape. MSI can design an array to monitor for the fracturing of the caprock and provide a precise location for the leak should one occur. Armed with this knowledge, the operator can proceed to fix the issue and prevent further damage to the environment.
Geothermal
Large scale energy supply derived from geothermal resources is an exciting area of development to support ESG initiatives. To achieve scale, geothermal energy providers are looking to oilfield expertise in frac’ing operations to create more fracture surface area and more efficient heat exchange with the fluids pumped into the heat chamber. Microseismic monitoring is a proven technology for imaging the fracture volume and will be an important part of the Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) development process. MSI’s experience as the leading provider of microseismic frac monitoring places it first in line to help operators in this pursuit.