Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) using fiber optics is a remarkable seismic data acquisition tool used for hydraulic fracture monitoring. DAS data within low-frequency bands has the potential to constrain hydraulic fracture geometry (Ge Jin et al., 2017). In this study we acquired passive DAS data during a hydraulic fracturing operation in the Montney tight gas area and processed the data to extract the low-frequency components. Strain rate and cumulative strain maps were successfully drawn from the low-frequency DAS data. These map showed pressure changes near the fiber optic cable related to the fracturing operations, and detected both the position and time of the fracture hit from adjacent wells, enabling an estimate of the direction and the speed of fracture propagation. Since these DAS results present distinct characteristics that cannot be obtained by conventional monitoring methods, this method could become a standard monitoring method optimizing hydraulic fracturing operations.
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Ichikawa et al. (2019) studied this question.