Image of the day: Hydraulic stimulation at Cotton Valley

Microseismic monitoring technology allows geophysicists to map the fractures as they are created during the stimulation process. This image shows a map of the fractures created during stimulation at Cotton Valley (an early East-Texas tight gas play). This shows the extent of a typical stimulation zone - a few hundred meters either side of the injection point, and no more than 50m above the injection depth. The black triangles show the geophones used to collect this data.