Hydraulic fracturing, which is an oil and gas well development process that involves injecting water, sand, and chemicals into rock via the well to create new fractures to increase oil production, has risen in popularity in the past few decades particularly in use on horizontal wells. What has also seen an increase in the last decade is seismic activity in the Permian Basin. This influenced my capstone choice, to focus on the possible relationship between well fracking, during the time the well is being fracked, and the increase in seismic activity felt by Permian Basin residents in the last few years. If there is a relationship, is there a way to use the features of fracking to predict the magnitude of this seismic activity. For more information on this project please watch this short video
The data for this project can be accessed here.
The visualiztions for this project can be viewed here.
Frac Focus is the national hydraulic fracturing chemical disclosure registry for the United States. It has been collecting data on frac wells since 2011.
IRIS the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, is a consortium of over 120 US universities dedicated to the operation of science facilities for the acquisition, management, and distribution of seismological data.
TexNet CISR was established as a product of the 84th and 85th legislative sessions, when the Texas Legislature tasked the Bureau of Economic Geology with helping to locate and determine the origins of earthquakes in the state and, when possibly caused by human activity, seek to help prevent earthquakes from occurring in the future.
USGS is the United States Geological Survey. The scientists of the USGS study the landscape of the United States, its natural resources, and the natural hazards that threaten it. You can find recent or historic earthquakes, lists, information on selected significant earthquakes, earthquake resources by state, or find webservices using their earthquake hazards page.
Frac Cleaning- explains the project and goes through the cleaning of the datasets to create the master data frame for modeling.
Frac Modeling- modeling the master dataset.
Frac USA- used to further clean the US data for visualiztion in Tableau.