Data-driven Microseismic Event Localization: an Application to the Oklahoma Arkoma Basin Hydraulic Fracturing Data

The microseismic monitoring technique is widely applied to petroleum reservoirs to understand the process of hydraulic fracturing. Geophones continuously record the microseismic events triggered by fluid injection on the Earth’s surface or in monitoring wells. The microseismic event localization precision has a large impact on the performance of the technique. Deep learning has achieved significant progress in computer vision and natural language processing in recent years. We propose to use a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to directly map the field records to their event locations. The biggest advantage of deep learning methods over conventional methods is that they can efficiently predict the characteristics of a huge amount of recorded data without human intervention. Thus, we use a CNN to predict the event location of field microseismic data, which were recorded during a hydraulic fracturing process of a shale gas play in Oklahoma, the United States. We use synthetic data with extracted field noise from the records to train the CNN. The synthetic training data allow us to produce the corresponding labels, and the extracted noise from the field data reduces the difference between the field and synthetic data. We use a correlation pre-processing step to avoid the need for event detection and picking of arrivals. We demonstrate that the proposed approach provides accurate microseismic event locations at a much faster speed than traditional imaging methods, such as time-reversal imaging. Comparison with an existing study on the same data is presented to evaluate the performance of the trained neural network.