In 2014, in the Bend Arch-Fort Worth Basin, when a connection between fluid injection underground and seismicity became a concern, the Railroad Commission of Texas began working with individual operators of those injection wells to help mitigate problematic earthquake sequences.
This was a seminal moment.
TXRRC, which was established in 1891 to regulate the rail industry, has through the decades been given jurisdiction over a number of industries, including energy, primary regulatory jurisdiction over the oil and natural gas pipeline transporters, natural gas and hazardous liquid pipeline industry, natural gas utilities, the LP-gas industry, critical natural gas infrastructure and coal and uranium.
So, despite the implications of the Railroad Commission’s name, the oil industry-related environmental impacts fell well within their purview to investigate and mitigate.
“They didn’t do it publicly,” said Peter H. Hennings, principal investigator for the Center for Injection and Seismicity Research, about the Commission’s work. “They began by working behind the scenes.”
There were politics involved, corporate public relations, as well as the science to sort out.
At about the same time, representatives from the Texas Legislature approached Scott Tinker, then-director of the University of Texas’ Bureau of Economic Geology, to ask if there was anything that the Bureau and other units at UT could do to address the earthquakes in the Fort Worth Basin and elsewhere in Texas. The result was the appropriation of funding in 2015 for the establishment of the TexNet Earthquake Monitoring program at the Bureau. That’s how TexNet, Texas’ earthquake monitoring system was formed.
But that was just the beginning of the effort.
It was clear to people like Tinker that there needed to be wide-scale industry involvement in such monitoring efforts in order for it to have maximum buy-in and benefit. Thoughtful and comprehensive research was key to developing an understanding that could drive consensus. That thinking led to the concept of forming a new research center at the Bureau: the Center for Integrated Seismicity Research.
What’s in a Name?
That wasn’t the first name the Bureau proposed, though. Initially, it was to be “the Center for Induced Seismicity Research.”
“It was called ‘the Center for Integrated Seismicity Research’ because industry didn’t want us to put the word ‘induced’ in the title,” said Hennings.
“In those early days there were a lot of sensitivities and industry didn’t want to presuppose conclusions about what might be causing these earthquakes until the issue was more completely settled using quality data and thoughtful research,” he added.
The companies did, however, all agree that the research that would be derived from such a consortium would be invaluable.
“The idea of setting up CISR would be to handle the more integrated research side and the geology and engineering aspects,” Hennings said.
There were other programs with a similar focus across the nation, like at the US Geological Survey, Stanford University and Southern Methodist University. But, Hennings said that the formation of CISR had a particular lane in mind.
“Other groups were looking into the seismology aspects of it, but nobody was diving into the integrated aspects that are necessary to fully address the issue,” he explained.
In 2015, when CISR was first proposed by the Bureau, two majors – Exxon and Apache – immediately committed to joining. Chevron followed quickly.
“After retiring in 2015 from a career in the industry, I came to the Bureau in early 2016 to get CISR going,” said Hennings. Since then, CISR has grown to more than 30 sponsors from upstream, midstream, land trusts, regulators and other stakeholders. He believes the motivations for industry to be involved in such a nexus are multifold:
- Induced seismicity causes operational and business risk, so understanding the nature of the seismicity and developing data and methods that help inform internal practices and forecasts is important for the bottom line.
- Companies realize that induced seismicity challenges their license to operate more broadly. And if induced seismicity becomes conspicuously prevalent, it can have a really damaging impact on the perception of industry.
- Companies value the research that can be done at the Bureau because of the deep integration that can be accomplished across geology, seismology, engineering and other areas to address what’s really happening in the subsurface. Hennings said companies like being affiliated with CISR, so they can learn and benefit from that research uplift.
- Finally, there’s the collaboration. With 30 companies in the room who are interested and invested in a problem, they can openly share concepts and advice.
“Some companies,” said Hennings, “like Exxon, Chevron, Oxy, others have big technology investments and have teams working on induced seismicity. They can be well ahead of us at times, because they have that kind of focus in the areas they operate.”
He said they look to the CISR for the overall collaboration. They help to steer the collaboration in the direction they think most benefits the research and therefore industry.
“Smaller companies, who don’t have that technology footprint internally or don’t have the ability to invest in such research directly themselves, look to CISR to be more of an extension of their technology capabilities, to extend what they can actually do … to augment things that they otherwise can’t,” Hennings said.
Ultimately, what CISR tries to do, he said, is contribute to the ability to “mitigate the hazard” of injection-based seismicity.
And the hazard is having a truly problematic earthquake, which could cause harm, damage infrastructure and/or widely interrupt business operations.
“So, the goal is to operate in ways that mitigate the likelihood of having problematic, induced seismicity,” he said.
The Role of CISR
Hennings is very careful to explain what CISR does and doesn’t do. While TXRRC has the regulatory power to enforce the shutting down or curtailing injection at wells, CISR plays the science role.
“We elucidate what the geological circumstances are coupled with the operational practices that can lead to induced seismicity in general, and lead to induced seismicity in specific geographic cases; so we would never say, ‘The industry should stop doing this and that.’”
CISR lays out the causes and the root physical processes that have been linked by its work and the work of others to induced seismicity in the impacted areas.
Cody Comiskey, who works for Chevron and has been on the CISR Science Advisory Committee for about eight years since the consortium began, said that CISR plays a key role, not only as a leading research group looking at critical issues around produced water and induced seismicity, but also as a data collector and aggregator.
“It can sometimes be difficult for industry to share ‘raw’ data company-to-company,” said Comiskey. “CISR aggregates and stewards data from multiple companies, to support various research projects such as conducting in-depth reservoir and geomechanical studies to understand fault sensitivity and reservoir characterization for disposal capacity.”
He said this especially important given most of the challenges around produced water in the Permian Basin are basin-scale issues, not isolated to smaller geological regions.
To help in those efforts, TXRRC gave CISR $3.8 million to license seismic data in the Delaware Basin with which to map seismogenic faults and improve the assessment of the induced earthquake hazard.
Hennings reiterates that that while there has been no direct harm or significant damage from such injection-induced seismicity thus far, it is important to stay vigilant.
“The public is aware and watching, and so are the stakeholder groups, who are leveraging TexNet earthquake data and CISR research to achieve reductions in the rates and magnitudes of felt earthquakes in Texas,” he said. “The real issue of course is the produced water, totaling some 15 million barrels per day in the Permian Basin. So, CISR’s research has evolved to study the overall impact of injection whether it triggers seismicity, pressurizes reservoirs or threatens environmental sustainability. This evolving focus even caused us to change the name yet again in 2022 to ‘the Center for Injection and Seismicity Research: CISR.’”