[FISH] Lei Li (Central South University)

“Towards sustainable geothermal energy production with microseismic monitoring”

Induced seismicity has a direct impact on the sustainable development of geo-energy resources, affecting both the efficiency and safety of associated industrial operations. With advanced acquisition and processing techniques, microseismic events can be used for fracture geometry characterization and dynamic reservoir monitoring, and larger-magnitude earthquakes are critical for seismic hazard assessment, though the two parts are inherently related.

In this talk, I will introduce an advanced workflow for microseismic monitoring and present two case studies related to geothermal energy production. Microseismic event detection and location is always the very fundamental ingredient in this workflow. Dense seismic arrays and deep learning algorithms have now become routine components for reliable and efficient data processing. Enhanced microseismic catalog allows for delineation of fine-scale structures, while source parameter estimation and stress analysis can offer more direct insights into fluid migration and fracture evolution. An open and general question remains: how to integrate observed induced seismicity with numerical and physical models of earthquake nucleation to better understand induced earthquakes across temporal and spatial scales?

About the speaker:
Lei Li is an Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Geophysics at Central South University and currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University. His research focuses on induced seismicity monitoring associated with industrial activities. He received his PhD from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2018, focused on waveform-based seismic source location methods. From 2016 to 2017, he was a joint PhD student at University of Hamburg. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Central South University from 2018 to 2020, where he optimized workflows for modeling, processing, and inversion of induced seismicity related to shale gas and geothermal energy production.

Friday Informal Seminar Hour —

Postdoc-run seminar series within the Earth Resources Laboratory (ERL). Features talks by ERL members as well as special guests from academia and the energy industry on topics including seismology, geothermal energy, carbon sequestration, machine learning for geophysics, multiphase flow, subsurface imaging, and uncertainty quantification.

Contact: fish_seminar_organizers@mit.edu