Induced and Triggered Earthquakes; Case Studies from Water and Oil Reservoirs

The current research concerns earthquakes triggered/induced by various human activities reservoir impoundments in southwestern Egypt and oil extraction in the Arab Gulf region. The current study describes the nature and characteristics of different cases of induced/triggered seismicity in different regions in and around the target areas. It is necessary to understand the conditions and nature of the earthquakes related to various human activities and energy technologies development in order to mitigate and assist their hazardous and environmental impact. In the present work, several modern seismic methods are applied including earthquake location, full waveform moment tensor decomposition, and source spectra have been used to discriminate between different types of seismicity of different origins. Our findings revealed that most induced/triggered events have higher non-double-couple components percentage than the pure natural earthquakes and with focal depths less than 10 km. Understanding the nature and scale of induced seismicity related to energy technologies, especially in oil and gas production fields can help to mitigate the risk and hazard resulting from oil and gas field seismicity. Carry out seismic source characterization and discrimination for different earthquake source areas based on the assessment of the potentiality of the expected future natural and induced earthquakes.