Potential of Using DAS within a Traffic Light System at a Geothermal Site

Summary We consider an upcoming Dutch geothermal site where planned production and injection wells will be equipped with distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) instrumentation for acquiring both active and passive monitoring data. Here, we focus on an approach to simulate synthetic DAS data of induced seismicity using wave propagation modeling. By comparing noise levels of DAS data obtained from literature against synthetic data an estimation of the capability of DAS for detecting weak seismic events can be made. This is relevant when considering to use DAS systems for feeding traffic light systems, which relies on the availability of reliable and accurate monitoring data. The approach can be further extended by accounting for broadside sensitivity of DAS, and by accommodating 3D subsurface heterogeneity in the model. The approach can be used to calculate the performance of DAS for different scenarios, and to optimize the design of DAS systems with respect to monitoring requirements.