First year of Distributed Strain Sensing in the Groningen field

The Groningen field in the Netherlands is one of the largest producing gas fields in the world. Although the compaction rates from reservoir depletion are very small, a detailed understanding of the compaction and subsidence is important due to the proximity of the surface to the sea level. To improve understanding of the strain development in the field, a DSS system has been installed in a newly drilled observation, which has acquired data for more than a year. Never before has it been possible to look in-situ at strain development in the reservoir in the order of several microstrain. The sensitivity of the system to strain is such that it observes the low strain levels developing after drilling disturbances in the near well bore, and that it starts to show correlations between reservoir properties and strain rate already after a few months of data. Since Groningen experiences relatively low compaction rates, more insights into the compacting behavior are expected to develop in the coming years as correlations between the incoming data and compaction profiles and trends become more apparent over time. However, it is very promising that meaningful data has already been obtained during the short monitoring period so far.