CPG

Short abstract:
We adopt extreme value theory used for seismicity induced by mining to seismicity induced by injection or production in energy industry to predict upper limit of the next record-breaking magnitudes. The methodology is based on the order of statistics and does not rely on knowledge and state of the subsurface reservoir or injection strategy. The prediction depends on history of record-breaking events resulting from the anthropogenic activity. We apply the methodology to three different types of energy extraction activity: natural gas production, salt water disposal and hydraulic fracturing. We show that the upper limit estimate provides reliable and realistic upper bound for magnitudes of the record-breaking events in investigated datasets including 15 publicly available datasets. The predicted magnitudes do not overpredict the observed magnitudes by more than 1.0 and underprediction of the observed magnitudes is rarely probably resulting from insufficient sampling of the statistical distribution of the induced seismicity. The richest dataset resulting from the downhole and surface monitoring of the New Preston Road hydraulic fracturing provides reliable prediction of the magnitudes over three orders of magnitudes with only slightly underpredicts of the largest observed event. While detection of weaker events improves performance of the method, we show that it can be applied even with a few observed record-breaking events to provide reliable estimates of magnitudes. However, in dataset where the magnitude determination is not self-consistent the methodology does not provide reliable estimates.

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