PEER has published Report No. 2025/13, Fragility of Wells due to Dynamic Shaking—The Impact of Ground Shaking on the Integrity of Natural Gas Storage Wells in California. The report was authored by Keurfon Luu, Preston Jordan, William Foxall, and Jonny Rutqvist of the Energy Geosciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Floriana Petrone, University of Nevada, Reno.
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Abstract
This report is one of a series of reports documenting the methods and findings of a multi-year, multi-disciplinary project conducted by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and funded by the California Energy Commission (CEC). The overall project is titled “Performance-based Earthquake Engineering Assessment Tool for Natural Gas Storage and Pipeline Systems” henceforth referred to as the “OpenSRA Project.”
The overall goal of the OpenSRA Project is to create an open-source research-based seismic risk assessment tool for natural gas infrastructure that can be used by utility stakeholders to better understand state-wide risks, prioritize mitigation, plan new gas infrastructure, and help focus post-earthquake repair work.
The project team includes researchers from LBNL, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, University of Nevada Reno, the NHERI SimCenter at UC Berkeley, and Slate Geotechnical Consultants and its subcontractors Lettis Consultants International (LCI) and Thomas O’Rourke. Focused research to advance the seismic risk assessment tool was conducted by Task Groups, each addressing a particular area of study and expertise, and collaborating with the other Task Groups.
This report is the product of Task Group C: Performance of natural gas storage well casings and caprock. The scope of this report is to study the dynamic response of wells subject to earthquake-induced excitation leading to the development of fragility functions regarding probability of failure. To that end, key model parameters have been first identified through a sensitivity analysis and Latin Hypercube sampling in order to generate wellbore response for a large selection of ground motions with different peak ground accelerations.