Seismic testing underway in Delhi

Denbury Onshore is producing mini-earthquakes in Delhi as the company attempts to map the oil fields beneath the town.

A crew was in the field last week testing the equipment and calibrating it to make sure their seismic testing wouldn’t cause harm to the town’s infrastructure, senior geophysicist Trevor Richards said.

The teams will use “thumper trucks” to send vibrations deep into the ground, creating what is essentially a man-made earthquake. The vibrations bounce off subsurface formations and back to the surface where they are captured by geophones. Geologists are then able to analyze this data to create a map of the subsurface area.

Richards said the trucks produce vibrations Denbury hopes to keep below 1/10 of that considered safe in order to cause

“Inside the town, we’re going to use the trucks,” Richards said. “Outside town, we use dynamite.”

Once Denbury has used this testing technique to better map the oil deposits, the company injects carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs that have already produced.

The goal is to stimulate additional production and recover more of the original oil in place.

Oil producers pump CO2 deep into oil fields, where the gas mixes with and swells the crude, decreasing its viscosity and enabling it flow more freely, greatly increasing recovery over the traditional water-flooding method.