Five Years of Deep Fluid Disposal into The Ellenburger of the Fort Worth Basin.

Edward Ficker
App Geoscience, Ft. Worth, Texas

A poster presentation will be made which will provide a regional overview of last five years of deep fluid disposal into the Ellenburger of the Fort Worth Basin. The Ellenburger is characterized as a compartmentalized reservoir in West Texas with significant secondary porosities attributed to lateral and vertical paleokarst features. Similarly, water wells producing from the Ellenburger in the Llano region, exhibit well yields that vary by several orders of magnitude. Those same attributes are likely to control the injection potential throughout the Fort Worth Basin. More than 834 million barrels of produced water have been injected into in the Ellenburger of the Newark, East (Barnett Shale) field from October 2005 through September 2011. The presentation will include comparative analyses of varied injection rates, injection pressures, and disposal volumes from this period. Earthquake data from the same period will be presented together with the spatial distribution of injection pressures, injection volumes and regional geologic structures. In addition, a preliminary Monte Carlo simulation from modeled injectivity distributions will be presented for the purpose of understanding the likelihood of finding high-performing disposal wells.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90152©2012 AAPG Southwest Section Meeting, Fort Worth, Texas, 19-22 May 2012