Abstract Managing fluid stimulation protocols is an effective means to mitigate the risk of injection-induced earthquakes during shale gas development. The success of these protocols is dependent on our understanding of fluid pressure heterogeneity and the associated inhomogeneous slip on critically stressed faults. Here we show the evolution of velocity-weakening zone on a simulated fault, derived from fluid injection and velocity stepped experiments, and the corresponding non-uniform fluid pressure distribution, recovered from coupled hydro-mechanical simulations. Our results indicate that the sharp extension of velocity-weakening zone occurs before the nucleation of fault rupture, which could be an indicator to avoid the reactivation of other fault patches beyond the stimulated zone. The dynamic rupture is estimated to extend much faster than the maximum speed of the velocity-weakening zone front. We infer that the velocity-weakening zone may further expand and fully control the fault behavior after multiple slip events.

中文翻译：

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页岩储层断层注浆滑移非均质性

摘要 管理流体增产协议是降低页岩气开发过程中注入诱发地震风险的有效手段。这些协议的成功取决于我们对流体压力异质性和临界应力断层上相关的非均匀滑动的理解。在这里，我们展示了模拟断层上速度减弱带的演变，源自流体注入和速度阶梯实验，以及相应的非均匀流体压力分布，从耦合流体力学模拟中恢复。我们的结果表明，速度减弱带的急剧扩展发生在断层破裂成核之前，这可能是避免刺激带以外其他断层斑块重新激活的指标。据估计，动态破裂的延伸速度比速度减弱区前沿的最大速度快得多。我们推断速度减弱区可能会在多次滑动事件后进一步扩大并完全控制断层行为。