The Groningen gas field, located in the north-east of the Netherlands, supplies a large proportion of the natural gas that is used both within the Netherlands and in the surrounding regions. This natural resource is an important part of the Dutch economy, but extraction of gas from the reservoir is associated with induced seismic activity in the area of extraction.
The aim of my PhD is to allow seismicity forecasts to be used to inform future extraction procedures, so that future seismicity can be reduced. In order to do this, a framework needs to be produced for comparing the abilities of current and future forecasting methods. Extra challenges, and therefore opportunities, are added to this task by the sparse nature of the events being predicted and the evolving structure of the sensor network that is used to detect them.
