This is the proposal

Hydraulic fracturing is a technique for removing natural gas and oil reserves locked within the

shale deposits. After the bulk of the deposit if pumped out with normal methods there can still

be a large supply of gas/oil inside small cavities in the rock. Using the same well shaft a

specialized fluid can be forced into the well under very high pressure that can crack open these

cavities and force out the remaining gas/oil deposits, greatly increasing the overall yield of the

well. However, this process has several adverse effects such as leaking of the specialized

hydraulic fluid into the water table, and the high pressure fluid designed to break up the shale

can create deformations in the surface layers. The latter could lead to earthquake swarms and

settling as this deformation subsides. The Powder River Basin, west of Gillette, Wyoming, is a

region of very heavy natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing.

The aim of this project is to use interferometric synthetic aperture RADAR (INSAR) to monitor

small surface deformations in the Powder River Basin due to the large scale hydraulic fracturing

efforts there. I hope to find a source describing the amount of fluid injected into several

different wells, and correlate this influx to the overall volumetric surface rise at each well. One

would imagine that an increase in the forced hydraulic fluid volume would increase the overall

deformation visible on the surface.

The region west of Gillette and Wright with the heaviest density of natural gas wells has good

satellite coverage. The ERS-2 satellite has about 100 images from 1995-2001 and the ENVISAT

has another 50 images from 2004-2008. In the area there are several dozen wells that should

be able to be imaged. The area also accommodates itself well to INSAR studies as it has very

little topography and vegetation that would reduce coherence for the interferogram.

A more advanced study could then look at earthquake swarms around these sites as the surface

deformation subsides.