Peter M. Duncan, founder, president and CEO of MicroSeismic, talks to The Energy Year about how microseismic monitoring changed hydraulic fracturing design and its future role in US and international shale plays.
MicroSeismic is a provider of completion, carbon storage and pipeline passive seismic monitoring services and software.
- MicroSeismic helped transform unconventional oil and gas development by enabling operators to observe fracture propagation in real time, replacing assumptions with measurable subsurface data.
- Passive seismic monitoring has become a critical tool for optimising hydraulic fracturing and is expanding into applications including carbon storage, geothermal energy and induced seismicity monitoring.
- As shale operations become increasingly automated, MicroSeismic expects real-time seismic data to play an increasingly important role in closed-loop completion systems and next-generation field development.
What is your assessment of the unconventional oil and gas space in the US today?
I would have to say we have moved from a time of discovery to one of development. When the shale revolution began, the industry moved through three discrete technological leaps: fracking, horizontal drilling, and microseismic monitoring.
Before the early 2000s we could see the hydrocarbons in the logs of shale zones we penetrated as we drilled to deeper conventional reservoirs, but there was no economical way to produce them. George Mitchell’s persistence in early Barnett wells led to the application of fracking methods in the late 1990s and showed the way, but vertical wells simply didn’t expose enough reservoir to be profitable. Switching to horizontal wells increased the reservoir contact dramatically, making production viable but that alone still wasn’t the whole answer.
The missing piece was the ability to see how fractures propagated in the rock. At the time, engineers had models, but they were first order guesses. Microseismic monitoring opened a window into the subsurface, turning assumptions into observable reality. That reality led to the “factory mode” field development being practiced today.
Why was microseismic monitoring so important for shale production?
Early horizontal completions were mostly “open hole” such that the entire lateral was treated at one time. The assumption was that fractures would form uniformly along the wellbore. Microseismic revealed a different picture: instead of fractures every metre, a 1,000-metre lateral might produce only a few dozen fracture events, with natural faults and pre-existing fractures stealing most of the treatment. That insight forced a fundamental change – operators moved to multi-staged, cased-and-perforated approaches (roughly 50-metre stages) to create many more, closely spaced fractures and contact far more reservoir rock. The result? Vastly more productive wells.
How does passive seismic work?
We liken passive seismic to a stethoscope versus conventional seismic’s ultrasound. Instead of generating seismic waves at the surface and imaging reflections, passive systems “listen” to tiny sounds – microseismic events – created during stimulation. These “snap, crackle and pop” signals are located and imaged in space and time to reveal the stimulated reservoir volume. Fundamentally, the science is the same as earthquake location techniques used by governments and academia.
Why did frack monitoring become your core business?
Ironically, we initially excluded frack monitoring when we launched the company, assuming major service firms already had that market covered. But the market spoke. The microseismic signals from a frack are tiny – the equivalent of dropping a soda can at the surface – but occur thousands of metres underground. Legacy solutions put sensors downhole to get closer to the source. MicroSeismic instead applied large-surface-array methods from conventional seismic, amplifying and beam-steering weak signals, allowing a single surface deployment to image long laterals or multi-well pads that were difficult and expensive to monitor with downhole techniques. That unique capability turned frack monitoring into about 95% of the company’s work.
What are the applications for passive seismic beyond frack monitoring?
While frack monitoring has been MicroSeismic’s dominant market, the same techniques apply broadly: monitoring induced seismicity from wastewater or CO2 injection, carbon storage verification, mining safety, enhanced geothermal systems and even sinkhole detection. We recognise that carbon sequestration and geothermal are obvious growth areas, though our commercial development lags shale.
Where is MicroSeismic headed?
Today the company is active in the U.S., Argentina and Canada, with smaller opportunities in the Middle East, Indonesia and Australia. We are very optimistic about Argentina. We also expect to play roles in carbon storage and, eventually, enhanced geothermal systems as those markets mature.
Possible strategic moves on the horizon include mergers with complementary tech firms – likely oil-and-gas focused. In the near term, we foresee U.S. shale moving to closed-loop completions with machine-driven, real-time decisions. Microseismic will provide a critical data stream in that automation loop.
Microseismic didn’t just inform frack design. It changed the way the industry understands and exploits the subsurface, and it will remain central as energy systems become more integrated and data-driven.
Source: Theenergyyear.com