Events

Speaker
Derek Elsworth, Energy and Mineral Engineering & Geosciences, G3 Center and EMS Energy Institute, Pennsylvania State University

Presentation
Prospects for Seismicity-Permeability Scaling — Key Needs in Pursuit of the Energy Transition

Abstract
Contemporary methods of energy conversion that reduce carbon intensity and address the energy transition draw heavily on fluids in the subsurface. This includes sequestering CO2, fuel switching to lower-carbon sources, such as from abundant gas shales, recovering deep geothermal energy via EGS, and diurnal and inter-seasonal storage of heat, H2 and energized fluids (CAES). In all of these endeavors, either maintaining the low permeability and integrity of caprocks or in controlling the growth of permeability in initially very-low-permeability shales or geothermal reservoirs represent key desires. Injected volumes are necessarily enormous, anticipated overpressures large and the potential for hazardous triggered seismicity significant. We explore conditions controlling the linked evolution of seismicity and permeability in particular with respect to the (i) scaling of seismicity, (ii) controls on permeability evolution and the (iii) potential to recover permeability evolution from physics-based models of microearthquakes linked to permeability evolution.

Bio
Derek Elsworth is G. Albert Shoemaker Chair and Professor of Energy and Mineral Engineering and Geosciences at Penn State. He is co-founder of the Center for Geomechanics, Geofluids, and Geohazards. His interests are in the areas of computational mechanics, rock mechanics, and in the mechanical and transport characteristics of fractured rocks, with application to geothermal energy, the deep geological sequestration of radioactive wastes and of CO2, unconventional hydrocarbons including coal-gas, tight-gas-shales and hydrates, and instability and eruption dynamics of volcanoes.

Location
CPE 2.204

Questions?
Rowan Halliday

About the Seminar
The Hildebrand Department’s Claude R. Hocott Lectureship in Petroleum Engineering is a weekly seminar series for current graduate students that features expert speakers on cutting-edge energy and subsurface engineering topics. For more information, contact Associate Professor Nicolas Espinoza.