Seismic Monitoring Around a Potential Deep Geothermal Site in Upstate New York: CorNET
As part of a plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2035, the Cornell University Ithaca NY campus is exploring the capability of deep geothermal earth source heat to provide campus-wide heating. The campus environment, on 3 km of flat-laying Paleozoic sediments over basement, typifies continental interiors worldwide, so lessons learned here should provide insight into the potential for geothermal heating in many places. In advance of potential production, a pilot borehole observatory is being drilled to basement depths in 2022 and a microseismic network has been deployed to constrain background seismicity since mid-2019. The microseismic network termed CorNET, operated by ARA for Cornell, consists of 15 short-period telemetered stations, seven in boreholes, in the greater Ithaca NY area. It has been operating with all data openly available, in an effort to maximize transparency of this high-visibility project. Initial earthquake locations are now being routinely produced. Nearly all detected events are either outside the array or cultural in origin, many due to local construction. Nevertheless, several detectable and locatable earthquakes have been identified, mostly a few tens of km outside the network and/or of magnitudes less than 1.0. Since CorNET was deployed the regional catalogs do not show any events within 100 km of Ithaca, indicating the need for local monitoring to quantify seismicity rates. Assessing this low rate of seismicity will be critical to establishing a baseline as drilling and potential geothermal resource work continues. These data also provide signals useful for characterizing structure, complementing previous site characterization studies around the drill site.
Session: De-risking Deep Geothermal Projects: Geophysical Monitoring and Forecast Modeling Advances II
Type: Oral
Room: Grand B
Date: 4/20/2022
Presentation Time: 10:15 AM Pacific
Presenting Author: Geoffrey A. Abers
Student Presenter: No
Additional Authors
Geoffrey Abers Presenting Author Corresponding Author abers@cornell.edu Cornell University |
Zachary Katz zsk4@cornell.edu Cornell University |
Matthew Pritchard pritchard@cornell.edu Cornell University |
Patrick Fulton pfulton@cornell.edu Cornell University |
Olaf Gustafson gustafson@cornell.edu Cornell University |
Aaron Ferris aferris@ara.com ARA |
Jeremy Salerno jsalerno@ara.com ARA |
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Seismic Monitoring Around a Potential Deep Geothermal Site in Upstate New York: CorNET
Category
De-risking Deep Geothermal Projects: Geophysical Monitoring and Forecast Modeling Advances
Description